One of the thought frameworks I use around training is: with this stress (no matter what level, interval, workout, block, year), are we trying to PUSH the paces up, or are we trying to PULL the paces up?
Let’s start with a semi-hypothetical person, AC. AC wants to get faster at running a six-mile race. She can currently run 10:00/mile for one hour. Her current finish time for that race is 60 minutes.
In order to increase that to 9:00/mile (or a 54 minute finish time, a pretty large improvement), she can PULL her current pace up by running FASTER than 10:00/mile. In order to get paces faster than current race pace, she can break the race up into sections, and run, say, two miles at 9:00/mile, then take a break, then repeat two more times. Over time, she’ll be able to take a shorter and shorter break between those three two-mile sections of 9:00/mile until she can run 9:00/mile for six miles.
In contrast, AC can PUSH her paces up by doing work that is actually slower than her race pace, but if she does enough of it, the volume of work will actually make her faster. This would look like building her weekly mileage up from 15 miles per week up to 30 miles per week, focusing on all mileage at 12:00/mile. Over time, if she keeps her effort steady, at the same intensity (measured by heart rate, or breath race, or perceived exertion, or lactate), her distance paces will increase to, say, 11:00/mile. And since the structures and functions adapt in order for her to go from 12-11:00/mile easy pace are largely the same structures and functions that limit her race pace, going faster at easy paces means she’ll also be able to race faster.
In a later blog post, I’ll talk about the physiological underpinnings of what is happening when you are pushing or pulling, but for now I don’t want to get into the weeds.
So let’s talk practicalities:
You can’t pull much, especially in the beginning. Pulling takes a lot of time to recover from, and so a beginner might only really be able to adapt from 1-2 GOOD pulling sessions per week, and as you get more fit you actually end up being able to push so much harder that you still can probably only adapt to 2-3 pulling sessions per week.
Pushing (when done correctly) is the absolute best bang for your buck in terms of the amount of signal to adapt for the amount of recovery time you need. Because of this you can push a LOT.
BUT, pushing has its weaknesses. Depending on your race distance, background, etc., pushing doesn’t work much on your technique at race pace, it can be boring, and sometimes your body adapts really well to what it adapts to (I know that’s a mouthful), and doing only one intensity mostly can make your performance stagnate.
SO, it’s often best to mix! Over millions of athletes and sports science studies, we know that 80-90% of your time should be pushing, and 10-20% of your time should be pulling.
NOTE: In practice, it’s usually best to POLARIZE your pushing and pulling. For AC (trying to go from 10-9:00/mile), spending a ton of time at 10:15 and a tiny bit of time at 9:45 isn’t going to make her progress very fast. BUT, if she spends a bunch of time at 12:00/mile, and some time at 8:00, she’ll likely progress pretty fast.
