What interval stimulus do you need?

Intervals have been used in sport since its inception to improve multiple different attributes to athletes' profiles. While there are many different ways to write intervals, today we are going to be breaking down the essence of the most common, a split work and then rest ratio, specifically for the sport of Fitness. But how does one know the best way to attack an interval? Should we be consistent across all sets, should we come out hot and hold on or should we try to negative split? There are three ways to approach this, and these three ways can actually apply across multiple different facets of intervals. All out and suffer, Consistent, and Negative Splits. We will discuss the different athlete profiles that respond well to each and the times that we can use the different methods to gain the most out of the sport. 

5 Sets

Row 24/16 Cals

12 Thrusters 115/85

12 BFB

60 Double Unders *heavy rope for elites

Rest 2 min btwn sets

In this example we are going to break down the different pacing structures someone can apply to these intervals to get different stimuli out of them.

Blow up/Suffer:

In this format we are hoping to develop the ability to tolerate physiological fatigue factors that come in during exercising. What this means is that we will be instructing the athlete to essentially blow up by round 4 or 5 and have a falloff in intervals. This might look like: 3:30/3:40/3:45/4:10/4:00 for their split times. 

Athletes that are going to need to work on this are 1. Athletes who don’t have a higher pain threshold, and for these athletes we might need to put parameters around the metrics we are expecting them to hit, and 2. Everyone, at some point in their training cycle/year. At some point in time, we are going to need to test the waters and come out hot on intervals to really find out where we are at physically for the sport, and to touch the ability to push past physiological limitations. You might just surprise yourself and find out you are more fit than you thought and could hold a faster pace on the rower than you anticipated. 

Consistent:

 This is what athletes are coached up to do the most. Hold consistent splits repeated efforts with very little gain or fall off between each interval. We might see split times looking like: 3:40/3:40/3:42/3:41/3:38. Ultimately this is good, but when you know your body well, interval splits like this end up leaving too much meat on the table, and we never truly push to see where our limits might be. IE, why a coach might instruct an athlete, who has been holding solid consistent splits on pieces, to try to come out a little bit hot and perform the above split times. We might just see that that athlete can hold a 3:20 pace vs a consistent 3:40. 

Athletes who benefit most from consistent splits though are athletes who are more powerful in nature. Our jobs as coaches are to work on holding them back a little bit more in the sport and teaching them how to sustain their power over the duration of work to come out with the best average across the board and not crash and burn like the above example. More often than not powerful athletes have a tendency to crash and burn like the above. 

Negative Splits:

If you have ever spent any time in the pool, or on a track, you are familiar with negative splits, if you grew up CrossFitting the concept of going slow at the start and finishing faster at the end might be foreign to you, but this negative splits are an excellent training too for the above mentioned reasons, teaching an athlete how to have sustained power output, AND giving very direct feedback on pacing. Often when we have a combo of all three of these formats in a week-2-week period athletes will become significantly better at pacing. 

On the opposite end, if we have a habitual pacer and athlete who already competes with negatives as their goal. We are training that athlete to move too slowly for the sport, and we need to have them doing things like the first interval method, so that they can training at speeds closer to the actual sport. This is teaching the athlete how to start out aggressive, and then naturally they will pick up speed from there.

Hopefully this helps in addressing what type of Interval methodology you should be performing. This is a base level case, and we get into more nuance around different intervals, works to rest ratios etc. As a general rule though these will apply to intervals so know which one you are attempting to perform, and you will see even more results in your training.