Quote Originally Posted by christopher leigh View Post
There was an article in the Daily Mail on Friday last week. Researchers from Stirling university took two groups, the first did 5x4mins hard 2mins easy, 3 times weekly on a stationary cycle. The second group did 60 mins steady 3 times weekly. After a month they swapped over. The researchers claimed the interval style training gave twice the improvement in power and performance. Researcher Stuart Galloway was quoted 'it is a case of training smarter. Amateur athletes tend to spend a lot of their training in the moderate intensity bracket which showed smaller improvements.'

This shows what is possible on a thrice weekly interval program for a month but it would be a mistake for an athlete training 5-7 days a week to do three interval sessions. They might get away with it for a few weeks but then they'd burn out.
When you collate the most effective global endurance programmes, i.e. those with used by the elite of endurance, there is only one single theme running through them. That theme is that when they work hard they really, really work hard, close to their maximum heart rate. Everything around that is done at an almost pedestrian pace. There is no, or very little moderate (or no man's land as I like to call it) training.

So if you are an athlete looking to improve, you may as well drop your moderate runs and save your chemical reserves for the tough stuff that makes a difference. Unless of course you can not muster the bottle to work that hard.