# Endurance Training - Maffetone



## Arsen Gere (8 Dec 2011)

Hi,
I have read in a couple of heart rate monitor threads here where people have experimented using an HRM for control rather than observation. This comes up in "Endurance Trainining and Racing" by Dr. Philip Maffetone. Does anyone have any personal experience of Dr Phil's methods and what are their observations. Another HRM book which I can't remember the title of also recommended going slower to go faster. Mentally I am struggling with this philosophy as most people do.

What I'm thinking is, looking at periodisation prior to the racing season this could be applied without risk, does this have merit?


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## amaferanga (8 Dec 2011)

Do you mean using heart rate zones and training in specific zones? If so then this is pretty common. What do you mean by risk? 

The going slower to get faster stuff is fine if your riding 15 hours plus a week, but if you're only doing 5-10 hours or so (and you're training to race) then you'd be better doing threshold work instead of lots of long steady miles. A lot of people will do one long ride a week and then a few higher intensity rides around threshold. Also, don't confuse doing steady miles with doing easy miles - you should still be tired after a 3 or 4 hour ride at endurance pace. Don't make the mistake of doing lots of riding at recovery intensity or you'll have a tough start to the racing season.


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## Arsen Gere (8 Dec 2011)

Maffetone advocates a maximum aerobic function, a heart rate limit not to exceed, the idea being keeping your body in a lower heart rate zone to encourage the body to adapt to a pure aerobic operation. The idea being you stay below a threshold and speed increases as your body adapts without any anaerobic training. All interval work above your threshold being anaerobic. I do much as you advise at the moment with some success.
Maffetone implies I would have greater success if I stuck to the aerobic route and used very limited anaerobic work. The anaerobic bit comes from racing.
Some people here have stated they are trying this and I wondered if they had siginifcant improvements over the more usual steady ride plus some intervals and threshold training, aerobic/anaerobic mix.
Maffetone implies that I'd have a great start to the racing season, which is what I am struggling with and contradicts what you say and what I believe hence I don't want to 'risk' doing what he says when I have something that works, but could perhaps do better without the pain.


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## screenman (8 Dec 2011)

I stuck with the Mathetone method for 3 months after getting back on the bike, after a long lay off. The benefits I felt was positive, my speed increased, my resting heart rate decreased, on top of that I never felt tired. After a 2 hour ride I could go straight out and work unlike the old days when a 2 hour high level 2 would knacker me for a few hours.


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## Rob3rt (8 Dec 2011)

I don't know the background of this certain Dr, but sports scientists are good at working out why a certain sort of training works, but they don't have a great track record of coming up with new techniques in the lab and successfully applying them to competition! Might want to bare that in mind!

Screenman - Without knowing your history, I would tend to say it's a given that with 3 months of cycling after not cycling for a long time your RHR would decrease and speed would increase. It is not particularly attributable to the type of training you did.


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## Arsen Gere (8 Dec 2011)

Maffetones book is endorsed by Mark Allen who is a six times winner of the Hawaii Ironman. He also lists a number of achievements in training top athletes and various other people who adopt the holistic approach. That is diet, barefoot type running etc. He implies he had has had a lot of success. However I don't know how much of this is a selection bias, how many people had more success by not following him?
So among us mortals if people have had more success following this than traditional methods I'd be very interested to hear of their experience.
@screenman thanks for your info.


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## amaferanga (8 Dec 2011)

I don't think copying what a professional athlete does with 30 hours a week (or more) to train when you have much less time is very clever. Just because it's (possibly) effective when you do 30 hours a week, doesn't mean its effective nor the best use of your time if you only train for around 10 hours a week.

Also, I seem to recall from Matt Fitzegerald's book Racing Weight that he was quite sceptical that the athletes in question (including that Ironman guy I think) actually kept the intensity of their workouts as low as they were supposed to.


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## screenman (8 Dec 2011)

The OP asked for an opinion on the Mathetone system, of which I have experience, the other posts come from people with no experience of it.

I would certainly not race off a pure diet of this level, however for winter base miles it certainly felt good and did what I required. It seemed I was less prone to illness when on this programme than I was on the old Peter Keene or Peter Reade systems.


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## Rob3rt (8 Dec 2011)

Ironman training is a different beast to most other events. I'm not saying an IM athlete doesnt do speed training (they do, and as far as elites plenty compared to more mortals) but an Ironman by its very nature is going to be a mostly aerobic exercise and training is going to have to include a lot of volume (and thus intensity must be lower else injury risk would be too great). That's common sense.


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## Rob3rt (8 Dec 2011)

screenman said:


> The OP asked for an opinion on the Mathetone system, of which I have experience, the other posts come from people with no experience of it.
> 
> I would certainly not race off a pure diet of this level, however for winter base miles it certainly felt good and did what I required. It seemed I was less prone to illness when on this programme than I was on the old Peter Keene or Peter Reade systems.


 
Since when did people have to have 1st hand experience of something to have an opinion about it?


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## screenman (8 Dec 2011)

Bit like saying a Ferrari drives horrible, when in fact the person may never have driven one.

The fact the OP asked for anyone with personal experience may have been a clue.


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## Rob3rt (8 Dec 2011)

ONE, of the OP's initial questions asked if anyone had personal experience.

One doesn't have to always have personal experience of something to be able to state a founded opinion.


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## screenman (8 Dec 2011)

How can you give a founded opinion without personal experience, surely it is unfounded.


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## The Jogger (8 Dec 2011)

I have used maffetone training in my jogging. It is the best way to avoid injury but is difficult with hills. I would try and do 1hr one day and 90 mins the next. In the running it's advised to do a 5 miler every couple of weeks to monitor improvements. I found it excellent for cardio base training. Positive results on rhr and recovery rate.


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## Arsen Gere (9 Dec 2011)

@The Jogger, thanks for that. I've already confessed to moving from road racing to trialthlon in the triathlon section, I get real knee and hip problems when I slow right down running. It changes my gate. So I tend not do do much below 8min miles. I can't decide on a 5 miler or a 5k park run to test my run speed or do they yield the same results?

So we have 2 for the method and some sceptics, me with an open mind tending to the sceptic side.
It looks like something to try in the early part of periodisation, round about now.

I noticed this season that if I did a very easy cycle ride on the Sunday about 80 miles or more the mid week 12 mile tt's I did improved. My tt times kept coming down all season (my second year of tt's after a long lay off, pb improving 2mins per year). ( See interleukin article). All the step changes in speed were after 80 milers, a bit of a plateau in between. But this may be coincidence or due to triathlons, duathlons etc. Therefore there may be some merit in using an HRM to control effort on a longer ride but it does not seem right. I may be answering my own question but this discussion helps!


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## Rob3rt (9 Dec 2011)

Arsen Gere said:


> @The Jogger, thanks for that. I've already confessed to moving from road racing to trialthlon in the triathlon section, I get real knee and hip problems when I slow right down running. It changes my gate. So I tend not do do much below 8min miles. *I can't decide on a 5 miler or a 5k park run to test my run speed or do they yield the same results?*
> 
> So we have 2 for the method and some sceptics, me with an open mind tending to the sceptic side.
> It looks like something to try in the early part of periodisation, round about now.
> ...


 
I get the same thing when running with my partner are she is notably slower than me and my stride becomes quite unnatural and I get a bit of pain here and there.

As for testing your progress it makes no difference as to whether you run 3 mile or 5 mile really as long as you always use the same distance, route and conditions to test.

I would suggest timing yourself and not relying on a parkrun timer when your really need to know your times accurately though. As a parkrun event director, I will be completelly honest with you, parkrun isnt about providing the most accurate timing, of course we try our best and the timing method is very efficient, but it is inherently prone to error, both timer operator error (extra clicks, clicks not registered), token error (wrong order given out, a runner not taking a token then the next runner grabbing it before the token manager can pocket it) and irritatingly usually runners not following instructions and times at the back end of the field can end up being 30-40 secs out sometimes after one or two little errors at a critical point.

I've been processing the results for over a year and a half now and usually the top positions are accurate, but then as the big crowds of more average paced runners (23+ mins) starts coming in, and people with dogs and kids etc, there usually ends up with someone or something causing some slight inaccuracies. A notorious one is someone running through the finish then looping back and finding their kid and running back through the finish again with their kids, so they screw up all the timing if the timer operator doesn't recognise them.



screenman said:


> How can you give a founded opinion without personal experience, surely it is unfounded.


Classic!


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## amaferanga (9 Dec 2011)

screenman said:


> How can you give a founded opinion without personal experience, surely it is unfounded.


 
I've never jumped off a cliff, but I know it won't be good for me.

Similarly, I've never tried this method, but I know enough about physiology and training to suspect that it's not the most effective way to train if your are (like most of us are) time limited.


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## screenman (9 Dec 2011)

I suggest you read his book, it is not all about 30 hours per week.


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## Seamab (9 Dec 2011)

Thought i'd throw this into the discussion (not that i've tried it just read about it). Might be relevant.

Joe Friel (Training Bible) advocates something called Aerobic Decoupling which shares (i think) some similarities with what is being discussed here. As i understand it from a cycling point of view (also used for runners) it's a ratio between Power or speed and HR. The general idea being that you start at typical base or endurance intensity by keeping either HR or power/speed fairly constant and monitor the relationship between the two.

See here for the theory http://home.trainingpeaks.com/articles/cycling/aerobic-endurance-and-decoupling,-by-joe-friel.aspx

An example 
Determine power-heart rate ratio for first half of ride: Power average = 180 watts, Heart rate average = 135 bpm. First half power-heart rate ratio = 1.33 (180 / 135)
Determine power-heart rate ratio for second half of ride: Power average = 178 watts, Heart rate average = 139 bpm. Second half power-heart rate ratio = 1.28 (178 / 139)
Second half ratio minus first half ratio = 0.05 (1.33 - 1.28)
Remainder divided by the first half ratio = 0.038 (0.05 / 1.33)

Decoupling rate is 3.8

If decoupling is less than 5% then you can move up to the next intensity level and so on.


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## Arsen Gere (10 Dec 2011)

@Seamab I have one of Friels triathlon books and I agree his techniques are applicable to cycling too. The only problem I have with the formula is measuring power. I don't have a power meter --- yet :-). Speed on a turbo is fine for using it as a power reference but on the road as I am sure you know there are so many variables so HR is a better reference when you don't have a meter as a measure of effort expended.

So from the formula above its watts/beat so for each heart beat you generated x watts because the time is a constant and can be eliminated.
I'll have a tinker with that.


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## lukesdad (10 Dec 2011)

You lot wanna stop reading too many books and get on with it.


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## Arsen Gere (10 Dec 2011)

Thats the problem, what do you get on with to improve performance in races without doing stuff that has the opposite effect like over training or getting hurt.


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## Enigma2008 (10 Dec 2011)

There are two key issues as I see it 1) definition of Endurance Training; and, 2) what do you want to achieve?

If you want to ride slowly for a long time then the low heart rates will help your body learn to use fats as the fuel source. If you want to race then it's still endurance but at a higher heart rate which will use sugars (glycogen) as fuel. So; which is that you're after?

Long distance endurance or race endurance? If the latter then the following synopsis from Optimize Endurance Training by Lance C. Dalleck, M.S. & Len Kravitz, Ph.D. Proposes that 'The lactate threshold is the most important determinant of success in endurance-related events.
Improvement of the lactate threshold is the main goal of endurance training.'

The correct training intensity is essential to the success of endurance training. Accomplished by:
Firstly a focus on developing training volume [this is the low heart rate stuff]
Then incorporation of steady-state sessions as close as possible to the lactate threshold [this is still endurance but higher intensity] 
Incorporation of interval workouts above the lactate threshold. [this is anaerobic endurance and falls outside this thread]

When you know/decide what you want to achieve then the above will give you some guide to what you need to do.


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## lukesdad (11 Dec 2011)

Arsen Gere said:


> Thats the problem, what do you get on with to improve performance in races without doing stuff that has the opposite effect like over training or getting hurt.


Well the first thing you have to ask is how many races and how long is the season, and Improve performance ? How would you quantify this ? A particular event, one race, a series. All will require a different approach.


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## Arsen Gere (11 Dec 2011)

@Enigma2008 Ah well that's where Maffetone would disagree with you and why I am cautious. He says you can calculate your max aerobic function and then train to that. If you have neglected your aerobic training for more anaerobic work, then when you run/ride at this MAF level you will be very slow.
By working at your MAF level for 3-4 months your HR stays the same but your speed will increase. So when it comes to racing, you depend more on your aerobic function and use fats rather than carbs for your race. Then at the end of this period you add some threshold and anaerobic work once this volume period is complete.
So this could complement Dalleck and Kravitz work.

What I did this year was to mix up the swim/bike/run volume and intensity, I raised the volume on the bike first with some intensity culminating in the Northern Rock Cyclone (107 miles), not a race I know but i treated it as a TT. I let the volume go down on the bike and raised the volume on the run to do the Kielder Marathon, then I lowered them both to do regular 4k swims. I'm working on raising the volume on all three (weather permitting) before the racing season when I'll drop it off and go for a bit more intensity to hit an important sprint event in April. Then pick up the volume again with a bit less intensity to hit IMUK in July. It was the only way I could see me getting the volume up on all three without being injured or completely knackered.


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## Garz (11 Dec 2011)

I like to read the people's literature to get a base opinion. From this I may either dabble with it or adapt it to get some real insight. However I do find that what works well for the test guinea-pigs or the proffesional (elite 5% in the world) may be worthless to the average Joe.

I too have found the low intensity workouts very beneficial for generic health and improvements. Once you start to plateau each individual will respond to different training methods, like mentioned above, you need to suit the training to your goals.


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