This is a topic I talk with athletes about frequently. I try to make the point that easy workouts are not only beneficial for you as an athlete but also necessary for both performance and healthspan – the absence of chronic disease and disability. From a performance perspective, most athletes believe they must push themselves to their physical and mental limits frequently to achieve their goal and that easy workouts are largely a waste of time. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I frequently mention to athletes I coach the performance benefits of easy workouts. You may already be aware of this. But just in case, some of the benefits of easy training (zones 1 and 2 in a 5-zone system) are that your body becomes better at using fat for fuel, aerobic capacity rises due to an increase in the pumping power of the heart’s left ventricle, there is an increase in blood hemoglobin that carries oxygen to the muscles, capillary beds become larger, more muscle mitochondria are created, there is an increased production of the protein carrier that allows muscle to use lactate as fuel, the type 2a power muscle fibers gradually take on the endurance characteristics of the type 1 fibers, and easy training hastens recovery after a hard workout. To balance the argument, some of these benefits, such as improved aerobic capacity, also result from hard training (zones 3, 4, 5). The difference is that you can do hours of easy workouts in a week but only minutes of hard workouts. The bottom line here is that it takes a combination of easy and hard workouts to be fast. Hard workouts alone would be a disaster for your training and your health. Both are necessary for endurance performance. Getting the balance right is the key to high performance.
Does doing less hard and more easy workouts help both performance and healthspan? There’s no doubt it does. This will certainly benefit both. Lots of easy movement has been shown to keep illness and disability at bay. But what about performance? Athletes I’ve recently started coaching often ask if they can do more hard workouts. Of course, my answer is a nice “no.” Then a few weeks into their training I ask how they are doing. The most common answer I get is that they are training easier but getting faster. There is also quite a bit of research on how athletes of all ages and abilities perform when they train with such an easy-emphasis routine. The studies strongly suggest that it is beneficial. The subjects get faster. Too much hard training gets in the way of high performance regardless of age.
I must admit that easy training can be boring. Working out in zones 1 and 2 frequently is neither challenging nor exciting. But doing the opposite—training mostly in the higher zones—while exciting, is not beneficial in the long term. I’ve helped several athletes get out of a self-imposed overtraining syndrome brought on by overly intense training. This is a far worse condition than most realize. Overtraining is not just fatigue, but rather an ailment accompanied by the loss of desire to train. It can take months to return to normal health. This is a rabbit hole you do not want to go down. It’s much better to be bored but fresh and eager.
You will be training the rest of your life—I hope. This alone tells you that whatever you’re doing it must be fun to last a lifetime. Both easy and hard workouts can be fun. Too many hard workouts week after week, however, will take a toll on the fun. At first such workouts are challenging and enjoyable. But that changes over a few weeks. It becomes more like punishment than pleasure. If you are currently missing a couple of workouts each week it’s probably going to get worse if you primarily focus on hard sessions. Missing workouts tells me, as a coach, that you not only have too much stuff in your life, but also probably too much stress. Something must go. I would suggest starting by cutting back on hard workouts and replacing those with easy ones. This will be much more manageable in the long term. Your workout routine must be something that can be maintained year after year for the rest of your life. That’s why I suggest a 5+2 weekly routine—five easy workouts and two hard ones each week. One of the “easy” should be a day off from training. I’ve found that this balances training not only physically but also mentally and emotionally.
