I decided to write this article because I often encounter this question of whether Lydiard training is not outmoded given all the scientific discoveries in the last five decades especially within the field of exercise physiology, the discipline that primarily informs us about how different types of exercise affect the body.
This article is not really about Lydiard, although the title implies it. Truth is you could insert “Cerutty”, “Bowerman”, “Igloi”, “Stampfl”, “Nakamura” or the name of any other great coach who formulated his or her theories many years ago and who either are no longer among us (and thus not able to interject!) or who do not seem inclined to be revising their methods because of the “Central Governor”, “the lactate shuttle” or some other fairly recent insight into the workings of the human body.
Experience tells us, however, that most of these great coaches, most or all of their methodology remains sound to this day without need for modification. Why is this when we change so many other approaches based on scientific research? To begin with, most people in athletics today accept that coaches and athletes are the real innovators of the sport and not exercise physiologists or sports scientists. Through gruelling experimentation and self-experimentation, the active participants in our sport are really testing their theories of what works and what doesn’t daily.
Percy Cerutty provides a great example as he was the quintessential naturalist: not a scientist but an astute observer of human movement and a strong proponent of listening to your instincts when it came to deciding on exact efforts for runs. His insights brought us runners like John Landy and Herb Elliott and read today remain relevant. Lydiard goes further in most respects as the ultimate self-experimenter having tested almost every combination and modality of training over a punishing 9 year spell. When he emerged on the other side, he understood the effects of different types of volume, different types of paces and how they would be best put together in the right order.
He had not heard of lactate buffering yet, although thanks to the works of Gerschler and others, he soon familiarised himself with the basic theory of what effects anaerobic metabolism has on the body. He implemented this and other science in his books but it did not lead him to revise his methods, rather he used it as a confirmation and explanation of what he and his athletes already knew worked. Peter Snell drew a few laughs at the Lydiard Seminar in Boulder by explaining “Lydiard liked doctors who agreed with him” but truth is the basic principles of the Lydiard system has held up to all scientific scrutiny since its inception.
In recent years, much has been made of the implications of the so-called “lactate shuttle theory” first proposed by Brooks in 1984. To avoid turning this article into a biochemistry level, the main implication of this study was that exercise scientists understood that the substance lactate (involved in the body’s energy systems) can be “shuttled” through muscle tissue to other muscles in the body. The ideas that arose from this theory were essentially that you also had to train to optimise your body’s ability to move lactate around in the body. Italian coach Renato Canova has been one person to link his teachings to the implications of this by recommending that a lot of exercise be done in the area at or just above an accumulation of lactate in the blood equal to 4mmol/l which is slightly higher than what many runners understood to be the intensity best suited for longer harder efforts and runs. Peter Thompson formulated a similar theory based on the “lactate shuttle” hypothesis and called it “lactate dynamics” in 1994 and recently launched a method he calls “New Interval Training“, a special type of intervals utilising active recoveries. As I showed in our recent article Nothing new about intervals?, this technique is not truly “new”, but merely back in vogue: the use of active recoveries in intervals has been a staple of Lydiard programmes from the beginning and remains so as can be seen in our description of them here on site.
Similarly with the lactate shuttle, Lydiard surely knew nothing off it when he chose, based on his personal experience, to setup his system as he did, and indeed there is not lack of exercise at an intensity that would stimulate the optimisation of the lactate shuttle in his system, as Keith Livingstone, author of Healthy Intelligent Training, explains:
I’d suggest that Lydiard’s 3/4 effort runs and fartleks during the build-up would physiologically cover much the same territory. It is impossible to truly have a “totally aerobic” buildup, as each time one runs up a sustained hill climb on a long run one is hovering very near anaerobic threshold, but the great majority of the run is a lot less stressful than that. So we’re talking shades of grey, not black and white. Even amongst ‘Lydiard coaches’ there are several approaches, and they all work. – Keith Livingstone
Another example is “steady state” a term trademarked by Lance Armstrong’s mentor Chris Carmichael in his “Carmichael Training Systems” terminology explaining it as: “Increase your lactate threshold by training at the edge of your aerobic/anaerobic threshold.” Lydiard had at the time been using the term “steady state” and “maximum steady state” at least since the late 1950s and it occurs in all his writing and the definition exactly describes training at the edge of the aerobic threshold.
So my advice: every time you are presented with something “new”, heed Solomon’s words in Ecclesiastes “There is nothing new under the sun”, because it is very likely to be just a repackaged version of wisdom long held and long employed by successful coaches everywhere. Successful performers are successful because they do what works and the thousands of hours done by thousands of runners out there and collected through the minds of the great coaches is the best guidance you are likely to get. Science will continue to deliver us insights about why it happens but they are not likely to fundamentally revise any of the major training systems in place today.
René
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Hi again. George here. Rene, you’re absolutely right in what you’re saying here. Arthur may not have used the same modern-day terminology to refer to the same things we now know as lactate shuttle, central governor, etc. But he certainly understood the physiology behind what we were doing, and far better than anyone else. As far as the “new” physiology goes, well, we runners are not experiencing anything new or different from what we always experienced when we train (ed) hard. We just have a new/better understanding of the physiology and describe those sensations with different word.
I believe this is getting even more relevant now as science has progressed in the area of physiology – rather than dumb machines, the so-called “New Biology” is revealing that we are much more complex than we thought. Umberto Eco used to use a metaphor for this – he said “I have 10,000 books in my library, which one’s do you think are the most important ones?”. His answer was counter-intuitive – “the ones I haven’t read, which is the majority.” He coined this concept “anti-knowledge” and said we should live our lives assuming that there is always much less we know about the world than we know whereas modern enterprises and some scientists tend to act as if we know most of what there is to know. First fatigue was thought to be caused by lactate, now we have a brain-regulated model of fatigue (“fatigue is an emotion”) with all the complexity that follows. But as you say – we experience it just the same and through personal trial and error we can get quicker to the ideal training methods than the physiological researchers trying to unravel what is happening “under the hood”.
Without a doubt we’ll look back 50 years from now and consider the current physiological theories childish, crude and severely incomplete. But the training won’t have changed much. I suppose the morale of the story is: science is fascinating and expands the horizons of human understanding, but it cannot keep up with individual trial and error in the field of sports. I think Lydiard said so himself – coaches are responsible for the main innovations, scientists just explain it later.