Now that we’ve established the basics of intervals in yesterdays Intervals 101: The Bare Necessities, we’re ready to talk the specifics!
As we discussed yesterday, intervals are just pace changes. But how long to you go hard? How long do you go easy?
What we need to remember is that the goal of endurance training is to adapt the body to your race pace.
So, one of the most important things to consider with intervals, is what do you need to work on? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses?
With intervals, we’re targeting two main areas:
1. Aerobic power: Long (ish) sustained speed
2. Anaerobic power: Short powerful bursts
Let’s again go back to our 6-minute miler from yesterday.
Let’s say we want to design a workout to build her aerobic power. We can hit this from both sides of the the interval lengths spectrum. What we’re going for is really amount of time at goal pace.
1. Long intervals with minimal rest: 5X (1mile @6:00/mile pace, .25 mile @10:00/mile pace)=30 minutes at goal pace
2. Short intervals with short rest: 15X (2minutes @6:00/mile pace, 30seconds @10:00mile pace)=30 minutes at goal pace
For an anaerobic power workout:
1. Medium Intervals with a long rest: 5X (.5 mile @ 5:40/mile pace, .5 mile @ 10:00/mile pace)
2. Short intervals with short rest: 10X (1minute @ 5:40/mile pace, 1 minute @ 10:00/mile pace)
Basically, it’s all about speed. You want to spend a lot of time at the pace which is your weakness. If you’re a cyclist and you need to get better at high anaerobic power sprints, you need to spend a lot of time at that pace. Longer rest enables you to work at a higher pace, shorter rest enables a lower speed to be more challenging.
As you can see with these, there’s is lot of both art, science, and creativity involved with writing interval workouts, but if you keep in mind the basics, you’ll see huge gains quite quickly!
