My Order of Operations to Training
MY ORDER OF OPERATIONS TO TRAINING
Everyone remembers PEMDAS as the order of operations for math. While I certainly won’t have a cool acronym that we all remember for the rest of our lives, I want to talk through a bit of how I think about what’s prioritized in training.
Through all my years of experience both as an athlete and a coach, I’ve realized that the HIGHEST correlate with performance is consistency. Chat with any coach, any high level athlete, in any sport, and you’ll likely hear the same. Consistency is the pillar that I prioritize most with my athletes. When we come to any decision point, we look to keep consistency at the forefront. Success, especially in endurance sport, comes from stacking the days, on the weeks, on the months, and ultimately on the years. This isn't necessarily the sexiest way to look at training, but it’s tried and true. Part of success in endurance sport comes from accepting and enjoying the monotony of training. Another 10 mile easy run, another threshold workout, week after week, month after month. It’s the old sayings of “we’d rather undertrain you by 10% than overtrain you by 1%,” or “you should always be able to do one more rep.” While this certainly isn’t at the exclusion of mixing up sessions, including exciting workouts, and pushing limits when the time is right, this consistent, monotonous rhythm sets an extremely strong foundation.
When you have years under your belt of high quality, consistent training, your floor becomes incredibly high. You start to hum at this baseline level of mental and physical fitness, where you’re only 8-12 weeks away from a PR in a wide range of events, simply from a couple tweaks to intensity, volume, and frequency. You have an extremely stable platform to jump from into aggressive bouts of training to try and reach any huge goals. You have more margin for error to experiment with training because of established physical resilience. If something happens where you need to take a little time off, you not only lose less fitness, but you’re able to bounce back quicker. Consistency compounds, and when it’s established through proper training, you set yourself up for sustainable long term growth as an athlete.
So how can we establish consistency? Proper periodization, variety, a good stress:rest ratio, and more are crucial as a coach to keep athletes healthy, and consistently stacking. While these are key, one thing I have learned to emphasize with athletes is the importance of intuition. The ability to run on feel (here’s a full blog post on this), and to be interoceptive to what’s happening in our bodies and minds. When you start developing this skill, you have the ability to understand when to push, and when to pull in training. The little “on the fly” decisions become second nature. Whether it’s to cut a workout one rep short, or to run on the faster or slower end of the prescribed pace range for a workout, or to skip a run altogether. These are the little things that allow for a greater "training rhythm,” and allow for more consistent training. I work with athletes to develop this skill by communicating intensity via rate of perceived exertion (RPE), as well as pace (and sometimes only via RPE). I also push athletes to provide me with subjective feedback in their training logs as much as they can. Both of these put athletes in a spot where they have to reflect, and take ownership of their own training, thus developing their intuition. Not only does intuition help when it comes to making training decisions, but it’s an asset in any race environment. Athletes who can trust themselves amidst the chaos and fury of a race, have a massive leg up on athletes who are stuck to a pacing strategy, or an overinvolved race plan. The ability to trust these natural race instincts is something that is slowly developed when athletes must reconcile with effort in both training and racing situations.
The next piece in my “order of operations” is a focus on movement. As distance runners, we are so obsessed with the quantity of movement (weekly volume, for example), that we often disregard the quality of movement. In order to safely layer on volume, you must get moving in a strong and efficient manner. I’ve touched on this quite a bit in previous blog posts such as this one about sprinting. Much of this work is to influence our neuromuscular system to recruit muscle fibers and to develop safe, yet powerful, movement patterns. For most of my athletes, this looks like including drill sets, strides, hill strides, and specific lifting into training. These practices will get us in powerful positions, and will in a sense “clean up” our form. Once we are moving well, it’s easy to layer on aerobic work, and volume on top of this strong chassis. But if we try to do this the other way around, we’re simply engraining poor movement patterns into our brains, and it’s only a matter of time until an injury pops up.
This leads into the final (that I’ll go into here) piece of my order of operations to training. This is where most runners begin, but without prioritizing consistency, intuitive awareness, and attention to movement quality, they’re often running on borrowed time. This is the piece of aerobic development, or the quantity of movement. This is the classic distance running training with a mix of long runs, tempo runs, threshold sessions, VO2 sessions, fartleks, and everything in between. Volume, at any pace/effort, is a super potent dial to turn. But turning this dial must come at its correct place in the order of operations. A proper blend of these will create some magic, but when you skip some of the aforementioned steps, the risk is extremely high, and it’s why so many runners struggle with injury or burnout. This is the “stuff” that really gets you good, but it must fall into place after you’ve taken care of the order of operations.
To summarize, we start on our knock off PEMDAS journey with consistency. Consistency over years is what leads to sustainable and long term success in endurance sport. Consistency should be of highest value when you’re at any decision point in your training. Next comes developing a sense of feel, interoception, and intuition. Working on this skill will help you inform training decisions big and small, and improve race instincts and performance. Next comes improving your quality of movement, before then finally, layering on quantity of movement. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of this stuff, shoot me an email at owen@afterhoursathletics.com and thank you for reading!
