How "normal people" can train like the worlds best endurance athletes | Stephen Seiler | TEDxArendal
In this talk, Dr Seiler explains in words and pictures how modern exercise physiology laboratories reveal the body’s remarkable capacity for adaptation. He also tells us about the “laboratories” developed by athletes and coaches since the start of the Cold War in the 1950s. The laboratory of the scientist and the laboratory of the coach/athlete come together as Dr. Seiler describes his own journeys back and forth between them. By connecting the power of both, we have learned why “no pain no gain” is a slick slogan, but a fundamentally flawed approach to getting faster and fitter over time. Stephen Seiler has spent years studying the training habits of great endurance athletes. What he discovered has shattered the myths he grew up with in the US. Let him tell you why going “green” is also important for building endurance sustainably. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
A fascinating topic with an excellent speaker. I keep fearing that I’ll fall asleep at work. Thanks for this talk.
Somewhat ironically the comments seem very polarised
I really thought that was Harrison Ford in the thumbnail.
I always train very hard.i play combat sport. I did see my gains and athletic ability goes up but because of little rest and overdo ( trains 3 times a day excluding playing football and futsal. Total 4-5 things a day) i got 2 acl left and right. My friends who never train hard still got to play and now have been great than me. Lol. I should have slow down a little bit. Its too late now already past my teen years. Jokes on me nowday friends makes fun of me for being not anything anymore . Lol
I have tried heart rate monitors and watches to give me permission to run slow but they seem to break easily and I am too stingy to buy a new one. I am mindful of the talk test to confirm you are running in the green zone but I have found another method when running solo. That is to breathe in and out through your nose. If you start gasping for air through your mouth then you are out of your green zone and need to slow down or walk!
120 rpm 1 hour 3 days in weak
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Find your green zone and realise: u are already training like a champion ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️😍😍😍😍😍 how amazing
I have been following a polarized cycling training program. Never been happier and energized!
I had no idea Harrison Ford knew all of this.
If that virtual bike game thing came in horse racing, I’d be running constantly
BS. Normal people shouldn’t take steroids.
I spend many hours strolling in the mall. Lots of green zone training. I think i can run a marathon now and take on Kipchoge.
So David Goggins is wrong?
Awesome video ❤
What’s with this bizarre obsession so many people have with endurance exercise? It’s becoming more clear in recent years that it’s not healthy and causes heart disease, AFIB, musculoskeletal injuries, muscle wasting, adrenal fatigue, hormonal depletion, etc, etc. It also turns a lot of sedendary people off to exercise if they think they have to exhaust themselves to be fit. We should encourage people to be more active by exposing them to enjoyable forms of exercise instead of intimidating them with unrealistic endurance standards.
Nonsense
An elite athletes’s green zone is a normal person’s red zone. Green zone works for elites because they are doing a far greater volume of work at low intensity. Normal people need more time in the yellow zone. Seiler acknowledges this in many interviews.
Yes! Lot of easy long runs bud also ,and even more importantly, respect your rest days. That is where you get stronger. And then start up in your super compensation face ( from the book "The ten,the half and the whole" by Rob Veer – Dutch)
training 6 days a week for 6 weeks at 100% vo2 max for ten (10) minutes increased cytochrome c by over 300% while 65% vo2 max for thirty (30) minutes produced only a 72% increase in cytochrome c. Intensity over duration to increase fitness (endurance).
Excellent!!
🤔I love the idea and all but I’m really not convinced it works for all disciplines i remember Michael Phelps talking about his training regiment oh boy !, i don’t think even peer athletes could keep up with that i think he said that there was a period in his career he trained and swam every day for 5 years strait as in swimming if you don’t swim a day you loose 2 days , my observation of these high level athletes is that is all about recovery most of us don’t stretch our muscles enough or have a massage strait after every training session or cryotherapy chambers or saunas & cold plunge therapy and a nutritionist who dictate to us exactly what our bodies need or even have enough sleep with a full time job because being an athlete at that level is a full time job in it self. otherwise I agree with everything he says at the end about amateurs and the the sofa to the red zone analogy .✅
When you have a guy that suit and tie and looks like he never step into the gym are telling you how to train like athletes, Lmao, that’s how all these expert fraud and get money from sheeps
Awesome way to explain the endurance way
Who gonna carry the boats and logs?
What a shame we have to exploit animals to endure pain n suffering and death.
This man is hella boring to listen to.
Really are we comparing the green zone of an Olympic athlete to an amateur one? That’s not realistic they have been ptracticing really hard to get into that green zone that is the yellow for an amateur one
Back in 1992 I ran my first ever race. The London marathon. I only entered 3 weeks before the race. Because of my (2nd) job I had a guaranteed place. My friends were doing it and talked me into it. No running at all before. But my main job was a milkman. Lots of walking and climbing stairs.
So I trained for just 3 weeks and ran it in 4hrs 9 mins. My fitness levels were from just walking and stair climbing. And a little bit of swimming.
One of my favourite videos with Stephen. Simple and to the point!
I need to come back to this periodically, especially when some aches and pains start surfacing because I’m sharpening up for a race. Meh.
For me, this isn’t working. HIIT made me fitter. Not only jogging low speed. That made me eventually slower..
Just one word: Bravo and thank you 🙂
Ah yes. This is why you always hear the greatest athletes with the best endurance saying "I did nice relaxing exercise to get there"…. Oh wait, no they didn’t. This guy’s a quack. This zone 2 BS doesn’t help your cardio that much, it just makes you better in zone 2
I’ve been endurance training for seven years now and am 42 years old. Most of my runs are indeed in a slow pace where I can still comfortably talk, yet my HR tends to be around 155, which should be something like 85% of my max HR, if you count 220 minus age as the max HR. So it seems that I am training at an intensity that is too high, but what i do not comprehend is how come I can still speak comfortably if I am running at 85%? The only explanation that II have is that probably my max HR is higher than 178. If in my case a HR of 155 would equate to 65% of max HR, then my max HR would be 238, which seems nonsense. So I realy wonder why my HR always stays that high?
Hahaha Cody making fun of one of the most dominant bikes from pinarello 😂
Also you should be looking at maybe doing some runs on some trails vs always concrete, would be easier on your knees
You are absolutely class man 💪
The issue is defining GREEN. 191W for a 420W FTP pro is 45% of FTP. That is way too low. Why even bother spinning legs at a pedestrian effort where you aren’t engaging useful energy systems, not sweating at all, barely breathing. Coggans shows mid Zone 2 is more like 65% of FTP. That is legit GREEN, but still takes work. Don’t read GREEN as being super easy. Esp if you only train 10-13 hours a week like most amateur cyclists. An 80/20 polar approach would mean 8-11 hours EASY and only a very small amount of hard. So the GREEN has to be meaningful too.
80/20 of 20h training week is 4 hours in yellow-red zones. He implies that non elites should keep 80/20. The story is good, but where is evidence for keeping 4h at yellow-red zones? For <2h events that would be more specific
Dr Seiler’s finding have been a great contribution to endurance training: his findings made clear that
a 80-20 division (easy-hard) is better than a 50-50. I have seen it countless of times: club runners perform way too much and to hard anaerobic tempos. But as soon as they skip a great part of their hard tempos, their race times improve.
However, personally I feel two things are missing in the research of dr Seiler: running economy and how to more efficiently train the aerobic fast twitch fibers.
Let us first look at running economy:
1) Many of the world-class runners are East-African runners who have a weight of 52-56 kilo. For example, Eliud Kipchoge – double Olympic champion and marathon world-record holder – weighs just 52kg.
2) East-African runners have shorter calf muscles and thus longer Achilles tendons: longer Achilles tendons give better running economy (free elastic energy). Research of Gary Hunter at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (in 2011) found a strong correlation between tendon length and running economy.
Hence, two reasons why East-African top runners can maintain a reactive running style. Even when they run slowly, they bounce every step.
Unfortunately, an average runner does not have the advantage of the longer Achilles tendon but does have the disadvantage of carrying 10-20 kilo more: reasons for not being able to apply a similar economic – what I call a ‘reactive’ – running style as the top East-African runners do. As a result, a heavier built runner may well increase their aerobic ability which, theoretically, might take off one minute from their 10km time. However, they may also lose their running economy which may make them two minutes slower. Thus, their actual performance could be worse.
Secondly: some top runners have up to 90-10% division slow twitch versus fast twitch fibers.
In most average runners however, the division slow twitch versus fast twitch fibers is around 50-50%. Fast twitch fibers are partly aerobic and it are these fibers which are important when we want to run fast in middle and even long distances. For these two reasons I believe that the division slow versus fast training of 80-20% is not valid for the average runner and that even top runners could be better off with a different composition of their training. How do we train the aerobic fast twitch fibers? The Easy Interval Method (easyintervalmethod) gives the solution! (E-book and printed copy at Amazon and Apple.) My finishing statement: "Normal people" should not train like the world’s best endurance athletes. Regards, Klaas Lok
I wonder how this applies to weightlifting
Stephen Seiler pretty much defined the baseline for "The Norwegian Method" of training which have resulted in not just xc skiing domination but also (via Marius Bakken) to the world’s best triathletes and the middle distance Ingebrigtsen brothers. Jakob in particular have put in so much below threshold training that he also wins whenever he starts in a 5K race.
That the key a full time worker I run 70 to 80 miles a week 200 miles on bike rand swim 12 miles the vast majority is at maftone or your green zone.the goal is to keep the LA below 1.0 mmol. You want to go faste,r go slower first
This is amazing and based on medical and sport science. Thank you so much 💓!!!
The 80:20 (green:red) rule only works when you train more than 10 hours.
Do this instead: Train in red zone for 2 hours per week. Whatever you can train more, train in green zone.
Brilliant video
Harisson ford persona
Fantastic presentation
Oh ok, so putting less effort in works? Seems like an idea you can monetize 😂 Red zone all day long bro 😂
Polarized training is amazing!