Maffetone training

[Twister]

I've just read this book:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Big-Book-End...8471195&sr=1-1

And have been at it for approx 4 weeks. Normally I would be training very slowly at this time of year, but at my "MAF" heart rate of 145 BPM I can run just over 11 min miles before I need to slow down.

Incredibly slow running is what it feels like, but the idea is as your body learns to burn fat for fuel you get to run faster at this lower heart rate. Its interesting stuff, the book is not very well referenced though and mostly annecdotal but there are a lot of annecdotes. There is also quite a bit of woo science at the end of the book, but I'm keeping an open mind and am going to try this technique for a couple more months.

[Twister]

So I'm about 2 and a half months in to this now, and I've seen my average pace per mile at my MAF heart rate of 145 drop to around 9-10 minute per mile. Maffetone's idea is that sustained training at such a low heart rate develops the anerobic system far better for endurance and allows us to use fat burning to fuel the run (he's quite anti carbo loading BTW)

The heart rate is worked out by subtracting your age from 180 and then either adding or subtracting further based on a kind of question and answer thing. It ultimatley puts your "fat burning zone" a bit lower than normal.

So, it's working, but progress is slow, from talking to other runners on American forums it seems that you need to stick at this for 6 months to see any benefits. The goal of course is to get my time per mile as low as possible at a low as possible heart rate, which precludes to being a better runner and competitor.

[that_fjell_guy]

Interesting! Seems like something to try early 'off season' tho. Can you continue with your normal training or do you need to do MAF exclusively to reap the potential benifits?

[Twister]

Yes it's best to do this training in the off season where most people would log long slow miles anyway. From a personal point of view, we moved to France last year so my training has been sporadic to say the least. Now that I've finally settled back into a regualr running routine, the MAF protocol helps by holding me back a bit. I did do a race last weekend, of about 11 miles with over 1100 metres of climb, so I think that would class as an AL? Anyway, I didn't push myself too much and probably went as high as 170, which would be anaerobic. I did feel good during the race and I finished with energy to spare, although my legs did feel tired.

So, I did my latest test over 5 miles 5 days later and found that I had an improvement - the point being that I think you can get away with some anaerobic running as long as its few and far between. Maffetone does allow faster runs once the initial base building stage is over.

Here's a typical Phil Maffetone rant - http://philmaffetone.com/thenewnopainnogaintrend.cfm be warned he's a bit of an old hippy, some of what he talks about is a bit mystical, but the fitness stuff is pretty good. So far it does seem to be working.