Transcription
Interval training and interval training is designed to maximize your aerobic power. How much blood can you deliver to the running muscles and how much of that oxygen that's delivered can convert fuel into energy? That's where your VO2 Max comes in.
When we talk about VO2 Max, VO2 Max, that means volume of oxygen Max. Max, by the way, there's a little dot over the V and that little dot means a one-minute volume. If there was no dot there, it might have been a two-minute volume or a 30-second volume, but we convert any other volumes to a one-minute volume to standardize it. So we call it V.O2 Max, and that's where our term V Dot came from. Any of those are familiar with V Dot?
And the guy who did it is a guy named Philthy Gilbert, or Jimmy Gilbert, sorry, I call him Filthy. Um, Jimmy, Jimmy is an absolutely great physicist and and science. He ran for me. One of the weirdest dudes you'd ever know, really. This guy is out there. I mean, his two events for when he ran track for me were pole vault and distance running. You don't do that. He came from Paducah, Paducah Tilghman High School in Kentucky, and he comes to school in college with a letter sweater, has an H on it. I said, "Jimmy, I thought you went to Tilghman High School." He said, "I did." I said, "What's the H?" She said, "That's for high school. She said the junior high kids have a J on theirs."
We're driving to a meet one time out in Oklahoma, and he says, "Oh, look at all those little cows." I said, "Yeah, those are calves." He said, "Oh, they look just like little cows." No, he's out there. But, but before he even earned his master's degree, NASA hired him. And every time they'd fire about three PhDs, they'd give him a raise. And he wrote onboard computer programs for the lunar lander and the Apollo missions. This guy knows math and he knows science, and he did all the V Dot stuff. And where V Dot came from is right there, V.O2 Max. So V Dot stands for your VO2 Max, and he just called it VDOT in the original computer programs he wrote in Fortran back in those days when they used to have Fortran for writing in computers. He told me to email him one time about 20 years ago. I said, "What's email?" I don't know.
So that's what the purpose of interval training is. And that's done at about 97 to 100% of your max heart rate. And the reason I like to call it a little under 100% is because if your max heart rate is 180, and you're doing some intervals and you get 180, do you know if you're going too fast? Because if you're going too fast, it's going to be 180, I mean, that's for sure. So you want to be right at it or a little below it, so you know you're not going too fast. Because going too fast, I'll show you a good example of that if you can see this.
Let's say you're doing some intervals. This is your VO2 Max up here, right? And let's say your VO2 Max is associated with running at a six-minute mile pace, okay? So you start down here. It takes one, two, three, four. Let's say you do a five-minute run at that speed. It's going to take you about two minutes to get to your max, and then you're going to level off at your max. So if you run a five-minute run at your VO2 max at that speed, you're going to get three minutes at your max, okay?
Let's say you're going to do five of these. And let's say you do the first one at 5:45 because you're all rested up and you're feeling great, okay? What happens if you run it too fast? VO2 goes up here and levels off at your max. You get three minutes at your max. You, you can't go up here because this is your max. So all the rest of this energy is anaerobic, and that hurts. So if you do the first one too fast, maybe you get the second one at the right speed. Then the third one, you run at 6:20 pace because you're pooped out, and you go up here and you level off at 6:20 pace, and you get zero time at your max. I don't care how bad you're hurting, you're not at your max. You might be max hurting, but you're not at your VO2 Max.
And so what's the purpose of this workout? If the purpose is to hurt, then go out real fast and be as miserable as you possibly can. But if the purpose is to spend time at your max, you better run them all at six-minute pace so you get at least three minutes on each one of them at your max. That'd be 15 minutes at max as opposed to only six, okay? So that's the interval training. I'll draw you a little picture of what interval training looks like.
Well, here's what easy training looks like. The height of that bar is how intense it is. Threshold training is more intense, but you don't do it as long, or you might do it with repeated bouts with short rest. Interval training looks more like this, where you do hard work, rest, hard work, rest, hard work, rest, like that, a bunch of those. I would limit those to five minutes max. Maybe they're only one or two or three minutes, but not longer than five because your VO2 Max is a speed of running that you could race at for about 10 or 12 minutes all out. So you're not going to go out and run five eight-minute runs at your VO2 Max. I like running five races at your VO2 Max. It's too intense. So you don't want to go more than about five minutes maximum. Usually people do interval 800s or interval thousands or interval 1200s, something like that. Are more, more important. And then, and these are hard. Remember, these were easy, these were comfortably hard, and these are hard. Sorry, they, they're not easy.