Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

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Although I never hated sports I had the same experience.

A few points for those who think about getting into running:

* make sure you are doing training units of at least 30 mins regularily. Going shorter than that is not really useful to get you actually trained.

* If you try to get better endurance most of your training should be aerobic (instead of anaerobic), this means it should be easy for you to do. Doing anaerobic training (so going to the max) is also useful, but it should not be the only thing you do

* regularily doing a little is always better than occasionally doing a lot. Set yourself some distance targets (e.g. 12 km a week). If it helps get yourself one of those sports tracker apps, or watches (Garmin, Polar, ...)

* with the right clothes weather does not matter at all (except maybe: too much heat/sun and not drinking enough)

* the most important thing are the fitting shoes (to avoid pain in the joints). Retailers will often offer a analysis of your running style and offer you the fitting shoes. Those should then be changed every 600 to 800 km.

* for certain people with bad joints or other related issues cycling or swimming might be better choices

Not an expert, but I don't think what you say represent the current state of knowledge. As far as I know...

> make sure you are doing training units of at least 30 mins regularily. Going shorter than that is not really useful to get you actually trained.

That's not true. Less time can be effective as well, given that the intensity is high enough.

> If you try to get better endurance most of your training should be aerobic (instead of anaerobic)

It's actually the opposite and interval training (mixed aerobic and anaerobic) seems to be more effective.

> the most important thing are the fitting shoes (to avoid pain in the joints). Retailers will often offer a analysis of your running style and offer you the fitting shoes. Those should then be changed every 600 to 800 km.

Running without shoes (or barefoot-shoes) is probably even better once you have adapted to it.

> for certain people with bad joints or other related issues cycling or swimming might be better choices

Even rope jumping is considered much better than jogging since the force is always distributed across both legs at the same time.

>> for certain people with bad joints or other related issues cycling or swimming might be better choices

> Even rope jumping is considered much better than jogging since the force is always distributed across both legs at the same time.

If your joints are bad enough, you have to specifically avoid impact. Rope jumping is slightly less bad than running but still one impact after the other.

Cycling and swimming require cyclical motions that you can perform without having to sustain impacts.

Speaking from close personal experience here (my SO), rope jumping is actually what caused the joint problems. She can't do running or rope jumping anymore. Swimming and cycling are no problem though.

All this just to back up GPs claim that swimming and cycling are great alternatives to running if you have bad joints. As parent said, rope jumping is indeed slightly better than running, but still not a great alternative due to impacting motion.

One more thing: not a doctor.

    >> If you try to get better endurance most of your training should be aerobic (instead of anaerobic)

    >It's actually the opposite and interval training (mixed aerobic and anaerobic) seems to be more effective.

Wrong and easy to prove that its wrong, just look at a training regiment of any elite runner in any distance. Most coaches agree that 80% percent of your volume should be easy aerobic for any goal. Doing high intensity without a well developed aerobic base means you will hit a plateau with your performance sooner or later.

    >Running without shoes (or barefoot-shoes) is probably even better once you have adapted to it.

The Born to Run fad has been over for years now. Consensus is incorporating barefoot running into your training makes little difference to performance except you'll probably injure yourself if you're not careful.

I've been walking in barefoot shoes for 2 years now and I've gotten tremendous benefits, but running serious mileage in them is a completely different story. Unless you want to get better at barefoot running, it's not useful.

Again, if it was useful at all you would be seeing professional athletes doing it. The most they do is some barefoot strides on the grass by the track.

Caveat that I’m not a runner, but in every other athletic activity I’ve done, you’d never compare elite athlete regimens to normal peoples.

They have resources, time, (usually) age and genetics working for them. Trying to train like them is usually a recipe for injury and burnout.

So I think when we talk about “effective” we should probably contextualize it.

> Wrong and easy to prove that its wrong, just look at a training regiment of any elite runner in any distance.

That's a bad comparison. Elite runners' first priority is to win and get out maximum performance. But for regular people, the goal is to overall improve their body and condition using a small time span. Since the goals are different, the methods are as well.

That aside, I believe athletes _do_ use interval training (HIIT). But if you have a source, I'd be interested.

> The Born to Run fad has been over for years now. Consensus is incorporating barefoot running into your training makes little difference to performance

Again, I think you are focussing on pure/max performance. But I don't think that's the goal for the majority of people who start out with their training. You get higher speed / better performance when running with shoes for sure. But I think for the people we talk in the context here, the goal is to improve body condition and lose weight.

Sure, you are broadly correct, however.

>But for regular people, the goal is to overall improve their body and condition using a small time span

No, the poster above you directly specified running endurance. That's what we're talking about NOT just running for general health. And not limiting training to a couple of hours per week.

>interval training

Interval training in the context is a pace-specific running workout, not interchangeable with HIIT.

Besides that the main point would be that long slow aerobic training has benefits that HIIT doesn't, mostly regarding the volume of blood the heart can pump.

So its not just for performance. Long slow volume will give you a lower resting heart rate and adaptions that HIIT alone will not.

> No, the poster above you directly specified running endurance. That's what we're talking about NOT just running for general health. And not limiting training to a couple of hours per week.

Fair enough. I interpreted that differently, but maybe you are right and we were just talking about different goals/contexts.

> That aside, I believe athletes _do_ use interval training (HIIT). But if you have a source, I'd be interested.

Yes, athletes do use interval training for specific purposes. But they don't do it for the majority of their training because it takes a lot to recover from. Since it takes more to recover, it limits how much training you can do. And athletes recover significantly faster than an untrained person. A fascinating read is by the guy who set the recent 10k speed skating record [0], he basically cycled for 7 hours a day.

An untrained person can't do 'HITT' properly, it takes too long for their heart rate to recover to normal. If they do something like 1 minute on, 30 seconds off, their heart rate during the 'resting' interval will still be pretty close to their working heart rate. They won't manage to keep it up for more than say 5 minutes (random number).

Now yes, 5 minutes of HITT is more effective than 10 minutes of LISS. But 1 hour of LISS is more effective than 5 minutes of HITT. And you can do 1 hour of LISS everyday without accumulating a lot of fatigue. Where as if an untrained person did HITT one day, there's a high chance that the next day they won't be able to preform at the same intensity. There's also significantly lower injury chance doing LISS.

[0] https://www.howtoskate.se/

So if an untrained person wants to get most of a fixed amount of time, say 1 hour effective training per week (which is not much of course), what would be most effective for them?

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