Losing creativity in workouts - The dangers of classification

There are no magical workouts or magical zones. People always want to know how certain exercises impact and how one classifies them. Every time someone asks you a question about a workout, and you tell them exact details, then they’d say “you mean, a Vo2max workout” for example. In your head you think “No. There’s more than that”, but mostly agree.

Training has become engrained with the idea of classifying workouts based mainly on distance and speed. It’s human nature to divide the world into neat and manageable pieces. 

How can you break free from the grasp of classification and not lose your creativity?

Getting “stuck”

We have lost all creativity by making it more scientific and calculated. If we see 400m repeats, it gets automatically processed as “anaerobic” or whatever it is in our classification. In the words of Daniel Kahneman (psychologist, economist & author), we default to our fast system 1 thinking, never allowing system 2 to even have a check. In other words, there’s little actual thinking about what the workout actually does.

We not only think what does this workout bring to the table, but instead, in what classification zone does this workout fall. Once we have that answer, then we have an automatic answer for what it develops. As an example, do 100m - 400m repeats with near or full recovery is intervals or anaerobic workout. It’s all pre-packaged and there’s no thinking left. And when we give in to our automatic default answer for training, we lose creativity. We lose the idea that we can modulate any number of factors and change the entire dynamics of the workout and what they impact, just by simple and subtle shifts.

You could create a session, using nothing but 100m repeats, if manipulated properly with speed, recovery, tempo, and so forth. Sometimes intervals can work as tempo workouts. Instead of going all out on a 10K tempo run, if one preferred to do 100m repeats, they would and get the same effect.

Example: If you have a 5k runner who despises an 8k tempo run, but can do well in 400m repetitions with a 100m float recovery (“Float” recoveries also known as fast relax, involve running the recovery interval a bit faster than you would) that gets the same benefit of a tempo run. Just because it doesn’t fit the “tempo run” classification doesn’t mean you don’t try it. By occasionally being more specific while still getting the aerobic component, we reduce the risk of disrupting the wonderful balance of speed and endurance in a short distance runner.

This opens up possibilities. You start seeing that workouts aren’t simply about manipulating volume, intensity, and rest. Instead, there’s dozens of parameters you can play with. You can stress athletes in new and different ways. We’re no longer trapped by our pre-conceived notions. 

When we take “play” out of the picture, we lose some of our ability to be creative. Once we consider something “work”, it’s a stop sign for looking at a problem in a different way. We train people like a computer program, and neglect the dynamics that the human body challenges us with. Overly relying on classification gives our brain permission to stop considering the workout at any deeper level making us get stuck. We start defaulting to the same workouts over and over, not realizing all the interesting and imaginative ways we can get the same or better training effect. We get trapped in our own little domain of thinking about workouts in one particular way which maybe harming the athletes.

Whether its intervals or tempo runs just because you label something as “anaerobic capacity” doesn’t mean that the only way to develop “anaerobic capacity” is to do that workout in that manner. 

We do need a common vocabulary and it helps us as a profession. But once a coach understands the foundation and what others are saying, he/she should move beyond it. Classification systems are wonderful when you get started. But after a while, it becomes restrictive. Workouts should be a means to stress the athlete in a particular direction in which you want him/her to adapt. That means physiologically, psychologically, emotionally, etc. Our classifications for workouts are mostly based on one stressor (physiologic), neglecting the complexity of the human body.

The idea is to stop describing objects/ideas by their function and see what happens. This will shift our way of seeing a particular problem. It will help break free from getting “stuck.”