Don't Make Your Hard Days Too Hard

A common refrain in the running and cycling communities these days is, "Make your hard days hard and your easy days easy." Is that good advice? It depends.

It's good advice if you're prone to making the mistake a lot of (especially young) athletes make: keeping too high a pace on your easy days. If, for example, you're supposed to do an easy run on Wednesday between speed and tempo days on Tuesday and Thursday, then that easy run should be kept at a low and very comfortable pace to avoid over-working your muscles. The two risks here are 1) injury from over-training, and 2) tiring your muscles out so much that you can't capitalize on the benefits of your harder training days. 

Point 2) is especially important, because getting faster or better at running or cycling depends on your ability to push really hard during your most difficult training sessions. You're less likely to improve your top speed if you're only ever giving it 75% of your effort. When training, you have to go into the red sometimes. What happens with some athletes is that they don't give themselves ample recovery on their easy days, so their muscles are still tired on Thursday from what they did on Tuesday, and thus they can't push themselves as hard on Thursday as they need to in order to improve.

That's the idea. Unfortunately these days, the "keep your hard days hard" crowd has taken that even further in saying that we should do our hard workouts and our strength training all on our hard days, and do only easy runs and yoga on our easy days. 

The problem with this new point of view is that the human body only has so much energy and ATP and all the rest of it; trying to pack seven different workouts into a single day is still going to subject your body to the same problem described in my Point 2) above. If you blast all your muscles with a hard weight training workout, you won't have as much energy to push hard during your sprint workout or tempo intervals. Also, vice-versa: it's hard to get much hypertrophy going on in your strength workout if you've already tapped your muscles with a hard workout on the bicycle. 

The solution is simple and obvious: weight train on easy days. The reason this works is because your easy run or ride will not really tax your muscles much, so you can afford to push during your strength training, knowing that it won't compromise the integrity of your run (and vice-versa). Moreover, working your core and/or your upper body on today's off day will still give your muscles ample recovery time for tomorrow's speed workout. You'll have about 24 hours to replenish your muscular glycogen, and your core and upper body are primarily playing supporting roles in your running and cycling training.

Naturally, this all assumes that you're training all things on an ongoing basis. As a middle-aged man, that works for me. I'm not training to win anything. If you're training to win something, though, then you're likely better off following a more traditional training cycle, in which you spend some time building muscle mass, then build your endurance base, then do some targeted speed work in support of your goal event, and then go through a period of rest and cross-training. But this is a full year-long training cycle, and if you're the kind of person who needs to do that, you probably already know and didn't need to read it on my blog. 😉