Building Volume Safely | The One Metric To Rule Them All
When it was time to start seriously building volume, doing so safely was always on my mind. After thinking it would just be another Google search, I found out that is far from the truth. Although there were a few common threads, everyone seemed to have a different approach or rule of thumb to follow. Have you heard not to raise volume by over 10% per week? Of course, you have. But, is that just the safe route? It is too conservative? Are there circumstances in which 10% is too much? Mathematically speaking, at some point adding 10% would be just impossible. Then we can forget to realize that when training and building volume, the word volume can mean many different things. It can be based on time, distance, vertical gain, and any other metric you want to follow. You might come up with one of those metrics that you want, only to find out that using one of those them also isn't realistic. For an easy example, if you were to raise vertical gain by 10%, your time will most certainly go up over 10% because of the much slower pace. So then you are caught in this whirlwind of managing 10% of multiple metrics which can drive a person crazy. This was the main reason I looked into a coach at first. Not having to balance those metrics what worth its weight in gold. Now that I have more experience, have coached others, learned for many athletes, and hired coaches myself, there are a few things I have taken away as I self-coach my way to UTMB this summer. I want to share some of that insight with you now and the short story may make you want to rip your hair out. The short story is, “It Depends”.
Let’s try and come up with a few guidelines and practices we can follow going into this. The number one thing to remember with any training plan is that it's a plan. It's a template for what we want to achieve, it is not set in stone to the minute. Coming from a scientific background I know the importance of “plus or minus error”. You set a marker and then know that there's a “give and take” that may shift that number a little bit. As I mentioned a moment ago, if you try and take every metric you are using to build volume to increase at exactly 10% you are going to drive yourself crazy. This is because it’s almost impossible to do! Here are some good places to start. I won't and can’t tell you exactly what to do because there is no perfect plan. All I can do is break down each metric, what I think it's good for, and what I have learned trying to increase that metric.
One thing must be stated first before we talk about anything. This is something I would love to put in all bold caps and scream from the mountain tops if I could. And it’s so cliche it may make your head spin. God knows I got sick of hearing about it. What I’m about to tell you sounds like a cop-out, but being a little over two years into this game I can tell you with 100% certainty that it is true! And this one thing is not the “one metric to rule them all” that I mentioned in the title. And no, I’m not going to spoil that just yet. Consistency is way more important than any of the metrics I'm about to discuss both in a physical and mental capacity. A lack of consistency with ruin any training block. And try to forget about “motivation”. It may seem harsh, but motivation is for those who aren’t willing to commit to their goals yet or aren’t willing to make necessary sacrifices to achieve them. Although motivation is real, it shouldn’t be depended on to succeed. Does UTMB motivate me? Of course, it does. But it does not motivate me to work hard. It does not get me out the door. All it does is push me to try new things. New workouts. New nutrition plans. It motivates me to seek out new limits.
Mileage
I think this is a great place to start because that's where most people do. This is probably because it's the easiest to track, and frankly, the easiest to tell people about. So how would I build mileage safely knowing what I know now? I think first you have to put yourself into one of a few categories. Let’s start with the extremes. Are you someone who doesn't run at all and is just getting started or are you someone who runs every day and logs a bunch of miles? (Maybe over 50 per week) I would argue that both of these people don't need to worry so much about mileage as their metric for growth. If you don't run at all, the thing you should be building is consistency. For someone who is looking to just exercise and get moving then you should work up to 4-5 times per week for more than 4 weeks in a row before worrying about too much about building mileage. Now does this mean 10k’s 4-5 times per week? Of course not. It may feel like it takes a while, but starting slow will almost eliminate the risk of overuse injuries. Get a mile in. Just a mile. “But that seems so easy”. So do it. Get to one mile 4-5 days per week for a month. 5 Miles per week is already leaps and bounds ahead of the norm. Then once you have that 5 days you can work in a 2 miler and build that to 2 miles per day. 10 miles per week consistently is where you can move out of “beginner” in my opinion.
If you are doing over 50 miles a week consistently you can probably use one of the next groups of runners I'm going to talk about, but may want to look ahead to other volume metrics. From 10-50 miles is there the risk of overuse injury happening. From what I have seen, it isn't so much the total volume but how they are played out. If you run 10 miles once a week and zero mile the rest of the week, you are not putting yourself in a good spot. What I have to say really doesn't work if you can't consistently find 5 days a week to run. Many people love the 10% rule. In addition, you ideally don't want to be building more than 3 weeks in a row in most cases. So now we can look at things in 4 week blocks. 3 weeks of build with one week of recovery. Then we can just change the block depending on where you are at in your training cycle leading into a race. Finding consistency is generally called the base phase and it isn't always just for beginners. Maybe you are coming off an injury or a big race and have taken some time off from running. It's a good idea to put in a block of two of base to build consistency. Then we can work into this build phase. So a 4 week block starting at 10 miles may look like something like this (assuming 5 days):
Week 1 10 Miles
Week 2 11 Miles
Week 3 12.1 Miles
Week 4 Recovery which I will discuss in a moment.
To an impatient person, this may look like a waste of 4 weeks with “no real growth”. I have actually been fired as a coach by impatient athletes who refuse to build slowly. Although I don't use this method, mine is also slow. What a coach in this block sees is a healthy athlete. That is what is most important. More miles just feeds your ego. It doesn’t help shin splints. Not to mention, every mile is not created equal. 10 Miles at zone 2 pace is very different than 10 miles at a 1 mile pace :) Trust the method. Think about what this will look like in a few months. I see athletes' eyes open wide when things get real. Think about when you are at say 40 miles per week!
Week 1 40 Miles
Week 2 44 Miles
Week 3 48.5 Miles.
I can tell you from experience that the difference between 40 and 48 is pretty big. But getting there with no injuries is even better. Recovery and pull-back weeks are really up to you but I think it fair to say a 20% - 30% decrease in mileage is fair and will do wonders for your body. In the first example, week 4 may look like 9-10 miles and the next block will be up 10% from Week 3. In the second example, Week 4 may look like 38-39 miles.
The 10% method is a very “by the book” method which will get you there for sure. But I have found that my approach, especially when getting up around 50 miles, will work wonders. Here’s how I like to structure a block purely based on mileage. In the second example, the average of the three week block is 44 miles. That is the number that I care about. For me, week 1, 2, and 3 will all be 44 miles. I will get the same total volume, but a mental edge as well. Here is what I mean, and remember this is all from experience. Say in the 10% per week method you have a tough week week 1. You chalk it up to whatever excuse works best and head into week 2 hoping for a change. But this is 10% more work than you just struggled with. Sure enough, you struggle with week 2 as well. Now we are in a mental spiral that affects so many athletes. Then the conversation becomes, “If I struggled with 40 and 44, how the hell am I going to do 48.5?!” It’s almost impossible to go into that week with any sort of confidence. But let’s now say week 1 is 44 miles and you struggle. Now you say to yourself, “That was rough, but I did it. And I can do it again!” Then after week 2, you have that same conversation with yourself or even better you have a good week and say, “One more week of this is no problem”. Now you go into week 3 with much more confidence. You did the same 3 week volume, but mentally you are still in the game. Then on week four I pull back 30% of that average and week 5 make a 20% increase from week 3. So yes, I build 20% a month, not 30%. I’m healthy, my athletes are healthy, and that is all that matters.
Week 1-3 44 Miles
Week 4 31 Miles
Week 5 53 Miles
As we move on from mileage remember what I said about those that go over 50 miles. Once we are moving up past 60-70 miles weeks for most ultras, it’s time to start thinking about the peak phase of the training block, and although there will still be a milage increase, it won't be the focus of training and we will be worried about other factors that can lead to injury. Let’s move on to my favorite metric, but not the one to rule them all.
Time
Time is a beautiful metric. It’s probably the easiest way to train and certainly the best way to grow volume as a beginner. As a trail runner, this can be easy to understand and from my experience trying to get road runners to make the switch from mileage to time is almost impossible. Obviously, this isn’t cut and dry. There is certainly some grey area. If you are going to run a 100 mile trail run, mileage definitely has to be a concern, but I’ll give an example of why and how I implement time. If I asked you to jog at a Zone 2 pace for 6 miles this can probably be done, for most people who have been running consistently, in about 1 hour or roughly 10 min per mile. But now let's put that same runner on a technical rocky trail with 500 ft per mile of elevation gain and I want them to get the same stimulus as the track workout. Do you think that asking them to run 6 miles on this trail is going to be done in about an hour? Will the stimulus be the same for those two workouts? The answer is obviously no. You can imagine how things may be a lot similar if I said to that athlete, “I would like you to get 60 min of zone 2 effort today”. For the most part, it now doesn't much matter if they do the workout on the track, on a trail, or even on a treadmill. By understanding and accepting how some terrain will affect training, you can now use time as the metric, not milage. When you use time as a priority, the mileage comes as a byproduct. The more I learned this the more I noticed elite athletes talking in terms of time for their weekly volume. As I have mentioned earlier in this post, milage is a vanity number. It’s a flex. It’s a wow factor. If that is why you run, then so be it. Go for mileage. But if you are trying to stay healthy then time is the way to go. Or you can find a metric that incorporates them both! When building time you can use the same approach as you did for mileage. 10% or the method that I use will work just fine. The major roadblock is knowing how much time is “enough time” to train for a particular race. Well, most people know how long their race is in miles and use that distance to dictate total mileage. Think about how much time you're event is going to take you and use that metric to work toward peak time. Better yet, look at how much time you are running right now and just start to grow it effectively. You will learn how much time is a big week. This is a long game. You will figure out what works best for your body.
Vert
When I first started running ultras I thought I only needed to be focusing on vertical GAIN while training. I also thought that incorporating vert into my training was only beneficial if I was going to be doing a race with a lot of vert. I now know how far off I was, which is why it made it into this post. The benefits of vert go far beyond just “getting good at climbing”. Although vert has made my legs way stronger, which has translated into being a faster runner, I continued to incorporate and program vert into training plans regardless of the race my athletes or myself are doing. If our A race has a lot of vert that must be a major focus, but it can come around in the peak/specificity part of our training block. Vert is amazing for speed and tempo work to get the same anaerobic stimulus I could get on the track/road, but in doing so uphill I significantly lower the impact on my body. Even though my A race is on mountainous terrain, I still do pretty much all of my speed work on some sort of incline. The incline you use to do so will depend on your fitness. If you are using a treadmill, 6% is a great place to start in my opinion. If you are outside find a hill that you can run hard for the entire interval on. You do not want it to be so steep that you have to walk before the interval is over. Do not worry about your pace on these types of workouts. This is all about heart rate.
Speed is certainly important in any training plan, but so is walking. If you are doing an ultra in the mountains and you are not a professional there is a very good chance you are going to be walking most of the uphills. This is a very tough pill for beginners to swallow at first. It’s even hard to walk in training because you feel like you aren’t training, and you are most likely a lot fresher than you will be during the race. I can give a brief example of my first ultra, which was a 50k. I had trained on a section of the course that was a little more “rolly” than I was used to. This 3 mile section would take me about 45 min in training and I was able to jog the entire thing for the most part except for a few steep sections. This section was a little more than 20 miles into the race, but I had never done it with 20 miles on my legs. On race day I was convinced I was lost because of how long this section was taking me. I called my wife and said to her “I must be lost, I've been on this section for over an hour and it has never taken me more than 45 min!”. She reminded me (kindly) how slow I was going and how much more walking I was doing than in training. Sure enough, about 10 min later I came to the end of the trail and knew exactly where I was. Furthermore, I had never practiced walking before. It sounds so crazy that you can be a “bad walker”. I am still a terrible walker. Race after race, I take a little while to walk and people are blowing by me like I’m not even moving and they are also walking. I’ve said to my pacers many times in frustration “How the hell are they walking so fast?”. The simple answer is, they practiced! You will probably walk at some point in an ultra. This may even be on a flat section. Even if you are not training for a race get on some vert and practice power hiking. Walking recruits different muscles than running. Get some poles (it’s important to practice how to use them) and practice walking up hills fast!
I put the “gain” in all caps in the first sentence of this section for a reason. Vert doesn’t just mean up! This is one of the major problems with training on a tread. Most don't allow you to run downhill. My first 100 miler had 18,000+ ft of vertical gain. This is all I thought about. Climb. Climb. Climb. What I neglected was the 20,000 ft of decent! This made the course “net downhill” which should have made it easy right. When I did Rim 2 Rim 2 Rim of the Grand Canyon it had 11,000 ft of climbing in two 5,500 ft climbs. The down into the canyon and off the north rim should have been easy right? At mile 85 of the 100, I was praying for the downhill to stop! I dreamed of more climbing. My quads were smashed! My toes were destroyed from bashing into the front of my shoes, and my frustration levels were through the ceiling because I was going just as slow downhill as up! You must build downhill vert volume to strengthen those quads, find out you need bigger shoes for trail, and understand it’s going to be a slow go!
When considering “building vert” there are many things to consider, which is becoming a common trend. Everything always points back to building slowly. Whatever percentage you want to use is up to you. I do not grow vert (the total of up and down) by more than 10-12% per week and I don't build for more than 3 weeks in a row without taking a pullback week. This is especially important to consider if you have a mountain race coming up and currently your vert is relatively low and you know it has to build. This may make you want to start incorporating vert in earlier than later. You can dedicate a training day to power hiking or get one of your weekend long runs on something steep to get some hiking in. No one ever regrets being a good climber.
TSS
The one metric to rule them all! There are countless articles on the web about TSS (Training Stress Score) and different websites have different names for it depending on what you are using. I'm not sure what they all call them, but it will have something to do with training load or stimulus. And although this may be/seem next level, when you understand it you will have a much clearer picture of what your total training block is doing to your body and how different things apply different stress to your system. I learned this the most when training for Ironmans. There, I had to learn the stresses of not just running, but biking, swimming, and any other workouts I was doing. Obviously, you can’t use min/mile pace volume for swimming. The beauty of TSS is it factors not only distance volume but also time AND intensity for that time. TSS doesn’t care if you are running, riding, swimming, hiking, lifting, doing yoga, sitting in the sauna, or resting. All it knows is intensity over time. My first coach cleared this up when he told me, “Your system does not know you are running. It doesn’t change it's processes because you are running. All it knows is intensity for some time”. Sounds so simple, but also so true. By looking at your week and month in terms of TSS you can factor in any training that might come your way outside of running. You can also learn how intensity affects it, allowing you to shorten some workouts when life gets crazy or if the stresses of parenting limit how much overall time you have to train. How do you calculate TSS? You don't! You let your training software or coach do it for you. Training Peaks is the gold standard for this measurement. It is a free app that IMO every athlete should have. It links to your watch just like Strava and other third party apps, and most coaches program workouts using it. At first, it may seem overwhelming, but just like anything, you will become more comfortable over time. By doing so you will understand how a week where you run 100 miles and a week where you run 50 miles can have the EXACT same stress on your system. They can be two identical training weeks as far as stress but focus on different adaptations depending on your race. If that 100 miles was at Z1 pace and the 50 miles was on a 20% grade or sprinting on a track, you can understand how the body may feel at the end of those two weeks. By using TSS as my volume metric I can program easy running, hard running, vert, hiking, lifting, and the sauna knowing exactly how all of those different things are going to effect my overall stress.
That all being said, not all stress scores are created equal. I will gladly take questions on this in the comments below or in my free discord server, but how you measure your workouts so that your program can calculate your TSS is very important. The things I am about to tell you are specific to Training Peaks so if you do not use that program to track your workouts you may need to do some research on how to compare this to your program. In training peaks you will see TSS, hrTSS, and rTSS. Unless you are riding your bike, TSS doesn't matter too much as this depends on power output. The next thing that needs to be accurate is your threshold pace and threshold heart rate. A general rule of thumb here if you don't know, your thresholds are close to your 10k race pace and the HR for a 10k at race pace. If you are not running 10k’s then you may not be ready for this level of data. If you don't have a HR monitor and are going to be training for ultra’s it may be a worthy investment. If you are running 10k’s but haven’t “raced” one, just go look at the pace of a hard effort, or better yet, go do a 10k test while wearing a HR monitor. Once you know these values, you can input them into training peaks and it will also calculate all of your zones in pace or hr. Once inputted into Training Peaks, it will adjust your thresholds as they change automatically over time. Depending on your settings, it will usually ask if you want to use a new threshold to recalculate zones. The accuracy of these zones is very important to put the following into practice. Let’s assume you have inputted your thresholds into training peaks and they have calculated your zones for pace and hr. I use “rTSS” for any running done on a relatively flat run on a smooth trail or road. This can be anything from a recovery run to a long run. Any time the terrain is technical or there are significant elevation changes I will go with “hrTSS” and make sure I am wearing my HR monitor. This is because the software doesn’t know that you slowed because it was technical or because there was a lot of climbing, but your heart does. I will use “hrTSS” for these hilly technical runs and anything else that isn’t pace based. This included my strength work, cross training, and even the sauna. With this TSS dialed in I can now grow my stress over time, but incorporate event specific workouts into my training. As I go from a base phase to a build phase, for example, I can go from just Z2 running and consistency in the base phase to working in some speed and hill work in the build phase. By raising this intensity I may need to remove a day of training from the week to keep the overall TSS for the week in check. This may look like running 6 days a week at a nice easy zone 2 phase to now running 5 days a week because a speed or hill day created the same amount of stress as two zone 2 days from the previous week. Over time I will continue to grow my TSS and before I know it I will be at 6 days a week again, but now with a speed day built in. This is how I build other aspects of the block like how long my back to back long run should be. As opposed to just saying, “It should be half of your long run”, I go into Sunday looking at the week's TSS and run for as long as I have to at a certain intensity to achieve the goal TSS for the week. Sometimes this is short and intense. Sometimes it's low intensity for a longer duration.
Reguardless of how you want to train, just remember that there is no one perfect metric to follow but the more you can incorperate the balance and safe your training will be.
Keep er Lit
Brad
