Hey, if you like it, that’s fine. I’m constantly strapped for time, and I HATE distance work, so I don’t do it. My coach used to have me do 500s when I was swimming in high school. I hated that. Give me a nice 50 or 100 any day.
Ah, a high school swimmer. Well the distance work y’all did was craaaazy! In high school I was a wrestler, and not a very good one at that. As someone who has done a few triathlons, up to the half ironman level, I am jealous of you swimmers, you know. Running distance anyone can do if you just put in the time; biking is my strong leg; but swimming … no matter how much time I put in, no matter how good my overall conditioning, there is just no way that I won’t just get swum over by those who swam as kids and in High School. At my peak conditioning I went swimming with my business partner, who hardly works out but who had been a High School swimmer, and it was embarrassing how much faster he was than me! The only good thing was that I knew that per lap I was getting a much more intense work out because of my inefficient stroke and fishtailing. 
I can’t argue with any of your points, even though honestly my gut tells me that having the variety of some steady state as well should be “better” than exclusively short intense work, just because of my bias to the more variety of exercise the better. The data as it stands though seems to support your position. In particular I agree with your broader points, which is perhaps why both us had taken very similar stances to the op’s circumstance. It’s intense and for her it is fun, exercise as play; that is the part that should not go, even if it needs to be modified a little to start.
HIIT is more endurance work than is admitted. A typical 8 x 30 sec. hard with 90-120 sec. recovery( running) can add up to more than five miles of running with a proper warmup/cooldown.
My usual warmup for a race or interval session:
1.5 mile jog increasing pace throughout.
3 x 150m jog back
1 x 300, hard.
Cooldown: 1-1.5 miles jog.
Total :3-3.5 miles for just WU/CD.
Add 1.25 miles for the above mentioned HIIT work out and you have an endurance workout.
Yes, your interval training adds up to an endurance work out as well. Sleel’s warm up and cool down gets close to the same. The studies however are careful not to do that. For example:
Bang for your “buck” just shows where you should spend more of your time, that’s all, but I don’t think you should exclude anything from your training. I personally subscribe to the school of thought that you should be doing whatever you’re not doing now. Everyone has weaknesses, and often by addressing your fitness weaknesses you improve your strengths too. That’s why even though I spend most of my time doing shorter more intense metabolic conditioning sessions, I do go on occasional long runs. I’m small and weak compared to where I want to be, so I spend as much training emphasis as I can lifting heavy and using training methods that increase strength and muscle mass, while trying not to sacrifice much in endurance.
You need to train in lots of different ways if you want to be decent at everything, and my goal is to be a good all-around athlete. I don’t care about being a star standout, but I do want to be able to do just about anything pretty well. That’s why CrossFit is a decent fit for me, though I add in more gymnastics than they do, and I’m working on parkour skills (which are surprisingly close to gymnastics and martial arts movements) and I incorporate anything else I find that I suck at or want to get better at. I also bias toward strength more than the main site does, since that’s my known weakness. Guys in the CrossFit scene like Rob Orlando, who is close to my height and age, make me feel keenly how poor my strength is in relation to theirs.
So … how sore are you today?
I’ve been having knee and ankle pain (joints, not muscles) so until that goes away I won’t be taking that class again. I will note that I took a Zumba class on Thursday, which had similar sort of balls-of-the-feet movements, and I wasn’t sore afterward. (I’m pretty sure that’s how I screwed up my ankle, though.)
Ankle sleeves help when you’re very overweight.
Also, don’t discount the occasional NSAID (ibuprofen or naproxen are best).
And good quality cross trainers (not running shoes, but cross trainers) that should be new or relatively new. Arch supports if ya need them too help wonders.
I had said to workout comically easy, and that was to stress that the first few workouts should be at a level way below what the beginner thinks they can do. When a beginner asks a message board how hard they should work out, the only safe answer is to say workout at a level at which they don’t have any discomfort. Beginners have several factors which can lead to a serious injury:
Beginners are mushy – Their tendons, ligaments, cartilage, and muscles are soft and not ready for a high level of stress. Working them too hard before they can adapt can lead to injury.
Beginners are floppy – They don’t yet have the strong core muscles which allow them to hold proper posture. Their form suffers which means they are using different muscles than the exercise is designed for. They will often bend their back improperly or lean one way or another. This puts strain on the secondary muscles which can easily be injured.
Beginners don’t know their own limits – They see everyone else in the class going at full steam so they try to keep up. But the others in the class have been doing it for months or even years. If a beginner goes at that level, at a minimum they will have a high-level of lactic acid soreness over the next few days.
When a beginner is taking a class for the first time, I would recommend that they do everything much slower and easier than they are capable of. This will give them the opportunity to work on proper form and allow their body to start making the physiological changes necessary. They will still likely be sore the next day–an hour workout is a lot–but it will be minor and dissipate quickly. If they feel no soreness the next day, then they should up the intensity. This will allow them to safely find their appropriate level of exertion for their current level of fitness.
Thank you for the update olivesmarch4th. Seems wise.
You presented this as “the most intense class they offer” … I appreciate the fact that you have some past martial arts background and some, albeit less intense, fitness base, but once I again I’ve got to ask: maybe not the most intense class right off?
I don’t have any big quibbles with most of what you wrote, but this,
(bolding mine) is quite false. Muscle soreness has nothing to do with lactic acid buildup.
The problem I have with the advice to start easy and ramp up is that this advice more often than not means that someone who is new to fitness never actually starts pushing themselves and stays at the “comically easy” level. This is where you get the “3 sets of 20” crowd who do their weight machine stuff at weights a 12 year old girl could handle, then settle in on one of the cardio machines with their bottle of water and magazine for their 30–60 minutes on the treadmill at a studiously non-challenging level of intensity — so that they can do that amount of time without “getting significantly out of breath” (another piece of exercise advice that I think deserves to go in the compost heap) — and then wonder why they’ve been “working out” for 6 months or a year and yet haven’t made any appreciable progress past the first couple of months.
They’re following the advice, doing exactly what they were told to do, but they go nowhere. The problem is that that advice really only applies for very raw new beginners. But no one ever tells them that.
If I were a trainer, I’d assess a client or trainee over a few sessions and yes, keep them at relatively low intensities. Form should never break down, and hell, I wouldn’t even let them do anything with weight until they can do the movement nearly perfectly with body weight or a dowel. But I’d also be figuring out where their limits are so that I can start giving them challenges really early on. I’d explicitly let them know that progress is made by testing their limits, which means sometimes you push beyond them. You’re not going to get stronger, faster, or better unless you’re occasionally missing reps, or taking on a level of aerobic intensity that kicks your ass and leaves you gasping like a landed fish, or doing something that makes you dread going down stairs the next day because your legs are going to be killing you. Yes, you don’t do that on day one, but you should be starting to push a little bit very soon after you begin. If you don’t, you’re wasting your time.
Well, I am a stupid idiot. I injured myself at the gym. Sprained ankle, at least. I ran on the damned thing even though it was twinging, and then decided to increase my leg press weight by 20lbs.
I don’t think I sustained any permanent damage, but I am going to be hurting tomorrow. And yes, I very much see how this screws up the sustained fitness thing. I guess consistency is really what my goal should be.
Sorry to hear it.
Get well soon Olive.
The biggest problem with the industry is that there are people who experience injuries less than others, simply due to genetics or luck as much as anything.
Unfortunately they tend to not understand that not everyone is built like that, and keep proposing training methods that are virtually guaranteed to cause injuries for many people. Ramping up too fast is one of the classics in this regard.
As little as a 5% increase a week would put you at a 1200% improvement in a year, and yet you constantly see people arguing for even higher increases than that.
Otara
While I hope she does as well, it’s completely innacurate to say that “genetics” causes some to be more injury prone.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist – just a regular gym goer – to tell you newbies come in in January and are gone by early March at the very latest. The men sprain rotator cuffs and the women go into classes thinking that being couch potatoes for 5/10/15 or even 20 years means they can keep up with the fit, toned gym rat if they just “try harder”.
My mother was a state championship track runner and had been inactive the past 10 years until recently. I had her swear to me up and down that she’d only do a half class 3x/week for the first month. She had to get out of chairs by using her arms and she used NSAIDS and IcyHot that first month and took daily hot baths. But she didn’t injure herself because she didn’t think that she could go into a high intensity class a fat 55 year old and come out Jillian Michaels.
olivesmarch4th, how is your recovery coming?
I didn’t hurt myself as badly as I thought I did. The next day was mild discomfort but I was able to hit the gym Thursday. For now I’m not running or bouncing (trying to avoid pounding the ankle as much as possible.)
I’m glad it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be, but it did scare me good. I think I learned my lesson. Slow and steady wins the race.
Glad to hear it wasn’t so bad.
Bottom lines: build a base and add intensity from a base; DOMS does not require too much of a backtrack albeit it is best avoided by adding the unaccustomed eccentric exercise in small bit; ankle or other joint soreness requires immediate backing off before you do more serious damage.
It’s been another month plus … how’s it going?
For now I’m sticking to the stability/strength workout three times a week. Sometimes I swim and I usually do the elliptical for cardio. I’m still having issues with my ankle, so I’m trying to stay off it as much as possible.