Every athlete knows the expression “no pain, no gain” well. It’s concise, punchy, and even rhymes. The perfect, comforting mantra for when you wonder why you’re subjecting yourself to pain. By reframing your pain as an essential step toward achieving your goals, it incentivizes you to continue.
Endurance athletes in particular cling to this phrase. By definition, competing in endurance events means pushing yourself to your limit. And that hurts.
But is it really true that more pain means more gain? Few will dispute that pushing to the point of injury is counterproductive, but the right amount of “good pain” is much more controversial.
The idea that easier could be better seems absurd. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, right? But the science tells a different story.
Runners, in my experience, often adopt a masochistic approach to running. They want to run the fastest, so they think they should train the hardest. And logically, it makes sense. If your goal is ultimately to withstand as much pain as possible, doesn’t it make sense to build pain tolerance into your training?
“Specificity” is a theory in the sports science world that basically means, “practice what you want to become good at”. Which means, if you want to be good at tennis, your time is better spent on the courts than in a pool. While it’s well accepted that less specific training can still have benefits, the idea of specificity says that generally, more specific training is better than less specific training.
The idea of “specificity” can become murky, though. It seems to make sense that if you want to run fast and hard, you should train fast and hard. But then Arthur Lydiard challenged this assumption.
In Matt Fitzgerald’s book “80/20 Running”, he describes Lydiard’s revelation: “Lydiard realized that no runner truly needed to get faster, because no runner, regardless of how gifted or well trained he was, could sustain anything close to his maximum speed for even close to a mile.”
This doesn’t truly contradict specificity, but instead reframes the previous assumption that racing is about going “fast and hard”. Anything longer than an all-out effort is really a test of how little one slows down. It’s a test of endurance, and running long distances trains endurance. Decreasing intensity allows runners to spend more time running.
Running “relaxed” also can help runners train to stay relatively relaxed at high speeds; a pace that can be sustained for the duration of a distance race should feel fairly comfortable at the beginning. Once again, we can reframe the concept of what a race is to see how specificity still applies, but apparently dictates an entirely different type of training.
Using this new concept of training, he coached his runners to six Olympic medals and revolutionized the way distance runners train. While his athletes’ success makes a strong case for his training methods, it’s not exactly hard evidence. However, multiple studies have corroborated the basic idea of lots of easy running.
Dr. Stephen Seiler, a scientist at University of Agder, noticed that many endurance athletes trained at a lower intensity about 80% of the time. In one study he conducted, one group of runners trained at about 80% low intensity and 8.3% high intensity, while the other group trained at about 67% low intensity and 8.5% high intensity, with the rest of the time at a moderate intensity. The study was small, but still found a difference in the improvement of the groups, with the former group improving more. This is where the concept of “80/20 training” originated.
One small study can certainly give an inaccurate picture, but these results have been reproduced. Another study, by Thomas Stoggl and Billy Sperlich, examined the effect of polarized training. They created four groups with different low/moderate/high intensity ratios: 83/16/1, 46/54/0, 43/0/57, and 68/6/24. They evaluated change in peak speed/power and the change in time to exhaustion.
For change in peak speed/power, the first group saw a small decrease and the second saw a small increase-- the two groups lacking high intensity work. The third group, with a lot of high intensity work, saw a more significant improvement, but the fourth group actually surpassed the third group in improvement.
For change in time to exhaustion, the first three groups all saw significant and similar improvements, with the second group lagging slightly behind the first and third. The fourth group, however, saw over twice as much improvement.
Although the fact that the group running 68% low intensity dramatically outperformed the group running 80% low intensity may seem like a contradiction, it’s really not. 80/20 refers to 80% low intensity and 20% high intensity, and the first group represents something closer to “80/1”. The fourth group wasn’t quite 80/20, but it was the closest.
The 80/20 training method is commonly and erroneously conflated with “all easy running”. Critics will point out that you can’t get fast if you never run fast, and I can’t disagree. But 80/20 really refers to the concept of polarized training. It’s hardly a “just run slow” plan. It just emphasizes keeping easy workouts easy.
The theory is also based around time-- many runners have the misconception that it’s based on miles. Since the high intensity portion is faster than the low intensity portion, the percent of miles at a high intensity actually significantly exceeds 20%.
But while 80/20 does include a significant amount of time running fast, it’s worth noting that fast is not equivalent to hard. When your muscles demand more oxygen than they can get, your muscles start producing lactate. According to the website Runners Connect, a website intended to take a scientific approach to training, “in the absence of oxygen, your body can’t clean up the extra hydrogen ion created by lactate and this is what causes that burning feeling in your muscles.”
This is the mechanism that typically leads to pain that’s not caused by injuries. Anaerobic training is beneficial and necessary, but must be kept in moderation. Runners Connect explains that “after 6 weeks of anaerobic training, improvements reach a point of diminishing returns and the risk of burnout (caused by the lowering of blood pH) increases.”
For this reason, distance runners should generally try to avoid “going anaerobic” outside of limited, planned workouts. Running slower, or shortening faster intervals can help get sizable quantities of fast work in without straying into the anaerobic zone. Keeping fast work from being too hard makes it possible to do more of it. The pace one needs to run to hit the anaerobic zone is generally quite fast, so getting in high quality, faster work without going anaerobic is very doable.
Races and anaerobic work are necessary for the competitive distance athlete, so yes, some pain is unavoidable. In this sense, “no pain, no gain” does hold true. There’s a time and place for pain, but runners should avoid extending “no pain, no gain” to mean “more pain, more gain”.
Photo credit: Lindsey Fletcher
