Frequency training for running

I am a fan of frequency training; my body seems to respond to it. The best gains I have main in strength have been when I lift heavy often and playing with the volume to make sure I am recovered enough for the next day. The best example of frequency training is squatting every day, working up to a heavy single each day but never pushing it too hard.

Frequency is how often you train, for example, three times a week. Frequency is increased by training a greater number of times each week. Intensity is how hard you train, for example faster, heavier, less recovery.
BBC.com

Frequency training is challenging, and your legs are heavy every day. Often, you don’t know how you will feel until you warm up when your body just responds. The key to this high-intensity weight training is never to go too hard, never having to get excited to lift and stressing the nervous system too much. You just get in, warm-up, work up to a heavy single and then get out. It works with strength training, but does it work for running?

Middle distance runners such as milers in the preparation and races stages of the season seem to run hard every day. This is particularly true for intermediate runners at the high school and college level, where they run on the track most days of the week, making sure that they never push so hard that they can’t complete training the next day. Greats like Herb Elliot and Emil Zatopek ran hard each day and built world record pace. Emil Zatopek training famously focused around 200, and 400-meter repeats up to 40 times each but paced off feel and never all out.

Why should I practice running slow? I already know how to run slow. I want to learn to run fast.
Emil Zatopek

I am going to do a block of running frequency training to get faster. I am taking the rough layout from an old Frank Horwill article of training for the mile.

The weekly layout will look like this:

Monday: 3k pace, 2 x (1 x 400m + 1 x 800m + 1 x 300m)
Tuesday: Tempo, half-marathon pace
Wednesday: 4x 400m at mile pace
Thursday: Intervals, 5k pace
Friday: Recovery
Saturday: maximal sprints, 1 x 350m, 1 x 300m, 1 x 250m, 1 x 200m, 1 x 150m, w/ 400m walking rests
Sunday: Tempo, marathon pace

The volume and intensity for each workout will be adjusted by feel using the weekly layout as a guide. If I am not doing so well, the training will be replaced by a 35-minute recovery jog or, if really bad, some light 200 and 400m strides to just get the legs moving.

I will let you know how it goes.

The perfect 15 minute workout

I found this quick clean and press workout by Jim Schmitz many years ago, but I can’t find it again on the internet. It is excellent for general strength and conditioning if you do not have much time but have a barbell and some bumper plates at home. You could replicate the pattern with five progressively heavier kettlebells, but you might need to adjust the timings if you have to do the reps on both sides.

Three-minute warm-up:

Arm circles, body twists and circles, and a few free squats.
Empty bar set – 5 x Power Clean + 5 x Military Press (one Power Clean followed by one Press repeated for five total reps)

Two minutes per set, including changing weights, lifting, and a short recovery:

5 x Power Clean + 5 x Military Press
5 x Power Clean, 2 x Military Press and 3 x Push Press
5 x Power Clean + 5 x Push Press
5 x Power Clean + 2 x Push Press and 3 x Power Jerk
5 x Power Clean + 5 x Power Jerk.

Start with a conservative weight for the first set and add weight for each subsequent set. The final set should be challenging, but not so hard you could not do another rep if needed. My benchmark was always to do the last set with my bodyweight on the bar, but you could adjust it for your strength levels.

Example:

Set 1: 40kg
Set 2: 50kg
Set 3: 60kg
Set 4: 70kg
Set 5: 80kg

Creative Arts funding: What is really going on.

My Twitter feed over the last week has been full of comments like ‘disgusting’, ‘an absolute disgrace’, ‘shortsighted’, and ‘damaging’. The words have been attached to articles with titles including: ‘Plans for 50% funding cuts to arts subjects at universities catastrophic‘ from the Guardian, ‘Arts figures criticise plan to cut university funding for creative subjects‘ by the BBC, and ‘Office For Students consults on 49% cuts to HE arts courses‘ by the Cultural Learning Alliance.

As a Music Production graduate who spent much of my career teaching in or managing Creative Arts departments, these headlines come as quite shocking. The creative industries are a vital area of the UK economy and one in which we are world-leading. The subjects that feed the sector with talented graduates are expensive to deliver, requiring specialist equipment, and provide a route for students that are less academic and primarily from lower-income backgrounds.

These articles and comments have come in response to a consultation the Office for students and the Department of Education have been carrying out into redirecting a particular type of Higher Education funding. To understand what is going on, you first have to look at how university courses are funded.

How courses are funded

In England, university students pay up to £9,250 per year in tuition fees. The money is usually paid by student loans directly to the university. It is also common for individual courses to require students to pay materials fees or compulsory field trips at enrolment. If a course recruits thirty students per year, the course would then have £277,500 (30 x £9,250) per year to run that course.

In a typical university, up to 70% of the student fee would go to staff costs, leaving £83,250 to pay for facilities and resources for our example course. This might sound a lot, but once you have factored in the buildings and heating, security, marketing and recruitment, student union extracurricular activities, and general running costs, it does not leave much to buy the specialist equipment required to prepare students for world-leading industries.

Universities have got around this shortfall in two ways; the first is scale, the second is a government top-up called the Higher Education Teaching Grant (T-Grant). Most universities are large organisations with many thousands of students and take advantage of economies of scale by pooling fees for the non-staff costs like computers and buildings. Many courses can be run for under £9,250 per year, and so institutions charge the top rate to all students and then take a top-slice from all courses, creating a fund that can be bid for when subject areas require specialist facilities or resources.

To support the HE sector in resource-heavy subjects, The Department of Education has the T-Grant fund that provides high-cost subject funding allocated to these areas based on the higher costs. The new ‘Allocation of the Higher Education teaching grant funding in the 2021-22 Financial Year‘ consultation looks at how this fund might be used differently.

High-cost subject funding — supporting strategically important subjects. High-cost subject funding is currently allocated simply based on higher costs of provision, with little strategic prioritisation. The OfS should reprioritise funding towards providing high-cost, high-value subjects that support the NHS and wider healthcare policy, high-cost STEM subjects and/or specific labour market needs.
Gavin Williamson CBE MP

The proposal suggests 50% of the T-Grant for subjects including performing arts, creative arts, and media studies are removed for the 21/22 academic year and reallocated to high need areas such as those supporting the NHS, STEM subjects, and other areas with skills shortages. This proposal is in part a response to the Auger report but also part of the Government’s broader strategy to address the skills mismatch. It is worth noting that the DfS has identified eleven smaller specialist institutions that will retain the full T-Grant for these subjects.

The proposed courses eligible for the high-cost funding are:

Clinical Medicine
Clinical Dentistry/Dental Hygiene and Therapy
Veterinary science
Nursing and allied health professions (pre-registration courses)
Anatomy and Physiology, Pharmacy and Pharmacology
Sciences (Agriculture, Forestry and Food Science; Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Chemistry; Physics)
Engineering subjects
Information Technology

Impact

There are three primary reasons I can see why this is a problem for the sector and students. First is the timing; even if you ignore the impact of the pandemic, these changes are proposed for the next academic year, starting in four months. If approved, it will not leave long for the universities to react, finding funding that may already have been allocated for infrastructure projects or recruiting students to courses incentivised by the T-Grant.

Second, most universities work on overall budgets, so although the funding is being reallocated rather than removed, it will benefit some universities but significantly hurt others. Some universities that already teach both the high-cost subjects and the new strategically important subjects will offset the cuts in the creative arts with the increase in funding in other areas. Other smaller institutions that do not teach the new strategically important subjects will not offset the cuts, which means significant reductions to budgets that will most likely lead to redundancies.

Finally, and most importantly, the subjects facing 50% reductions in the T-Grant are the types of subjects that tend to attract students with lower grades and from disadvantaged backgrounds. My teaching career is full of stories of kids coming from deprived backgrounds that have found a passion for creative arts, studied hard, and then gone on to prosperous careers. If we are disincentivising universities away from delivering these courses by removing the needed additional funding for the required resources, will these kids instead choose to study engineering?

The Government has been clear, with 50% of people in the UK getting a degree by the age of thirty but with 8% of employers not able to recruit to positions due to a lack of skills and 13% having internal issues with skills, something needs to be done to address the mismatch. The Apprenticeships levy was the first grand step, and Higher Technical Qualifications (HTQ) is the next big move. Degree Apprenticeships and HTQs moving forward should help provide funding to give students the skills they need for work.

It is unclear how much the pandemic and lockdowns have accelerated this proposal and if it will be rushed through for the September cohorts. It is clear that if they are introduced, they will represent a reduction of the T-Grant of around £17 million for universities delivering creative arts courses. These might not be the same institutions providing the courses that the funding is redirected towards. I do not believe the reporting I have read has been fairly presented and does not consider the governments broader strategy and increased funding for skills. Still, the timing is poor and has the potential to impact those that most need support.

I would love to hear your views in the comments, on Twitter, or on Linkedin.

Strategy: point a, point b, and the line between

A strategy is a plan to achieve a goal that will provide the organisation with a competitive advantage. Generating a strategic plan begins with identifying the organisation’s purpose through a mission statement, a vision of the future, and a set of objectives as performance targets.

Once the direction is decided, the internal and external environments are analysed to assess the current strengths, weaknesses, and competitive environment. Tools like Porter’s five forces model, PEST analysis, and Resource-based view (RBV) support the generation of this internal and external map.

A clear picture of the environment allows the organisation to make choices about creating value and achieving a competitive advantage. Areas in which a company can choose to find an advantage include:

Undercutting competitors on price through economies of scale or reducing costs.
Differentiating products to make them more attractive to specific market segments.

The final strategic stage in how the organisation can achieve the identified competitive advantage is an implementation plan. The tactics of how the strategy will be carried out are created and documented. The means to carry out the tactics will be listed, and milestones draw up to measure progress.

If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there.
Yogi Berra

Many companies do not take the time to think through these stages. Simply documenting where they want to go, where they are now, and a plan to move from point a to point b can dramatically improve performance.

Strategic management process

Mission & Objectives
Analysis
1. Internal
2. External
Strategic Choice
Strategic Implementation
Competitive Advantage

Mission, vision, and strategy

I am currently working on an updated plan for how the university will move forward with flexible learning. The last fourteen months have dramatically accelerated the plans I drew up in 2019, and so it is time to be more creative and ambitious.

Thankfully we put into place three separate statements to help generate an online learning strategy:

Mission Statement – Who my team are, what we provide, who we serve, the benefits we deliver, and what is important to us.
Vision Statement – A previously ambitious and unique idea of the university we want to create.
Value Statement: Our beliefs about how work should be done, our standards, culture, and aspirations.

The mission statement has remained the same; we exist to move the university to a hyper-flexible delivery model that uses technology to redefine the student experience. The vision statement, however, like most universities strategies, has changed dramatically. The forced move to online learning has moved us past ambitious five-year plans and started creating conversations about what is possible, what is desirable, what works, and what future we want to make.

The external work has moved forward too. Suppliers like Microsoft and the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) vendors have developed the tools available to universities, making them easier to use and adding functions to support emerging practice. The demand for online learning has grown as people have spent more time at home and working and collaborating via a computer screen; their views on learning have changed.

There are three main tasks for the vision statement:

Consolidate the existing flexible delivery.
Build on that good practice to make it better; more interactive, personalised, and accessible.
Think up what game changers might look like in the new university landscape.

Writing a strategy is about creating a plan for how we deliver a mission and a vision. If you have not updated these three documents recently, it might be time to start designing the new normal.

Building monster fitness

There are four core elements to fitness; Strength, Stamina, Endurance, and Power & Speed. To be a monster, you need to be competent in all four aspects, along with flexibility, joint mobility, and core stability.

Strength is the ability to do hard, heavy work.

Strength is the foundation of fitness and is typically represented and trained through the slow lifts; Squat, deadliest, press, bench press, and the squat clean and clean and press. Strength is measured relative to bodyweight.

Stamina is overcoming resistance repetitively with efficiency over time.

Stamina or work capacity is carrying heavy stuff farther or doing more work in less time. It is typically represented and trained through circuit (Crossfit style) workouts or through repeating an exercise for a set amount of time, particularly bodyweight exercises such as a military PT test.

Endurance is the ability to go long and slow over distance.

Endurance or long slow distance is aerobic exercise such as running, cycling, rowing, and swimming, across the water, air, and land.

Power & speed is the ability to overcome resistance explosively.

Power is typically represented and trained through short bursts of anaerobic exercise, including Olympic lifting and sprints. Power is the outcome of being competent in the other three core elements of fitness. Increasing your speed is to minimise the cycle of repetition.

Searching (2018)

Today I rewatched the 2018 film ‘Searching’ directed by Aneesh Chaganty. The movie is worth a watch just for the way it is filmed. All the shorts are through the desktop of the main character’s computer, with the story told through video calls, text messages, web searches, and the occasional TV news report. It sounds like it would not work, but it does, partly down to the excellent editing.

The exciting thing about this film is how much you can do with your computer if you set up a link between your phone and laptop. The main character approaches the investigation into his daughter’s disappearance like a ninja project manager. He starts by creating a table with questions that he then goes through each of his daughters 96 Facebook friends completing a row for each. He goes through search history, social media accounts, text messages, and email, meticulously logging everything he learns and gradually finding clues to create a timeline of the days running up to the disappearance.

The situation in the film is extreme, but it showcases how much of the world’s information is online and how a computer can aid a systematic approach to solve a problem. It raises the question about how much more productive you might be if you learned to use your computer better and how methodical you are in your approach and documentation when problem-solving.

Two tasks for me this week:

Become a power user with my computer
Be deliberate in my approach and documentation in my problem-solving.

Marathon Pace

When people talk about a steady run, I think about marathon pace. Marathon pace is aerobic, so you should be able to do your whole weekly long run at this speed. It is also faster than your easy pace and so more interesting for those of us who are not running swift times.

Marathon pace
Variety: Steady run or long repeats (e.g. 2 x 4 miles at marathon pace)
Intensity: Generally in the range 75-84% of VO2max or 80-90% of your HRmax.
Purpose: Used to experience race pace conditions for those training for a marathon or simply as an alternative to Easy pace running for beginners on long run days.
The RUN SMART project

I have been reading the Frank Howitt archive on the Serpentine running club’s website; most of the pro-level training plans he suggests, from the mile to 10k, involve running 13 miles at a pace similar to an athletes marathon speed. Jack Daniel’s advises beginner runners could use this pace as an alternative on easy runs.

Pete Magill in ‘Fast 5K‘ says that the comfortably hard marathon pace is the slowest speed for a tempo run and recommends runners targetting the 5K build up to workouts of 25 to 30 continuous minutes. Pete advises initially breaking tempo runs into 5-10 minute blocks with 2-3 minute jogs as recovery to reduce the resulting fatigue and help you to auto-regulate the pace.

Fast 5K Marathon pace progression:

Beginner: 10min
Intermediate: 2 x 10 min w/ 3 min recovery jog
Advanced #1: 2 x 10 min + 5 min w/ 2 min recovery jog
Advanced #2: 3 x 10 min w/ 3 min recovery
Elite: 30min

Once comfortable performing 30 minutes of continuous marathon pace as part of your weekly 13-mile long run, you could pick up a marathon training plan for progression ideas. In Daniels’ running formula, Jack Daniels recommends 40-110 minutes and under 18 miles marathon pace per workout and between 15-20% of weekly mileage. Daniel’s says to use marathon pace when training for a marathon or building confidence in sustaining longer efforts.

Daniel’s running formula marathon pace workouts:

60 min E, 30 min M, 10 min E
60 min E, 40 min M, 10 min E
60 min E, 60 min M, 10 min E
30-40 min E, 80 min M, 10 min E
40-60 min E, 70 min M, 10 min E

Marathon pace is a fun, comfortably hard pace for steady runs to build stamina and confidence. The pace provides more muscle activation and physiological benefits than the traditional long-run easy pace but can be tougher on your body. Build up slowly to including more of the long run mileage at this speed until you can perform 13 miles at the pace. This approach will introduce enjoyment to the long miles, building a solid engine and strong legs to tackle any distance you choose to race.

Operator Fitness Standards

Special forces soldiers are fascinating. The levels of strength, conditioning, and resilience required to perform at the highest levels of the military are impressive. Operators have to be fast and agile in close quarters battle and carry large loads over long distances with little sleep. But how fit do you have to be to make it through selection?

The US Navy Seals tracked 2,208 candidates through three years of Hell Week to identify the physical standards of those that successfully passed BUD/S. The study found that the best candidates and those less likely to be dropped for medical reasons were fast runners and swimmers with high levels of lower body power. These high endurance applicants are more resistant to fatigue, less injury-prone, and less likely to make technical errors when tired. The lower body power allowed soldiers to handle the rugged terrain during selection better.

The events with the most significant impact on completing BUD/S were the three and four-mile run, the 300-yard shuttle run, and the 1,000m swim with fins. The one-rep max deadlift score showed the most negligible effect on success.

The paper provides future applicants with the best and worst passing scores on each Naval Special Warfare Human Performance Assessment (SEAL PRT) test and Naval Special Warefare Preparatory (NSW Prep) School Exit Test.

EXERCISES	BEST SCORE	SMART GOALS	WORST SCORE
Standing Long Jump	111 Inches	90 Inches or more	72 Inches
25lb Pull-up	20 Reps	13-15 Reps	5 Reps
Body Weight Bench	24 Reps	10-14 Reps	1 Reps
Deadlift 1 Rep Max	2.33 x Bodyweight	1.75 x Bodyweight	1.5 x Bodyweight
5-10-5 Agility	4.35 Seconds	4.4 – 4.8 Seconds	5.45 Seconds
300yd Shuttle Run	56.0 Seconds	60 Seconds or less	67.7 Seconds
3-Mile Run	15:33 Minutes	18-19 Minutes	22:37 Minutes
800-Meter Swim with Fins	11:28 Minutes	12-14 Minutes	15:46 Minutes
1K-Swim with Fins	14:10 Minutes	17 Minutes or less	19:11 Minutes
Push-up	119 Reps	90-99 Reps	70 Reps
Sit-up	109 Reps	80-89 Reps	61 Reps
Pull-up	30 Reps	19-21 Reps	10 Reps
4-Mile Run	21:48 Minutes	27 Minutes or less	30:00 Minutes

Fitness test scores of successful BUD/S candidates

A separate study of 1500 students from BUD/S classes found that ‘The leanest students completed Hell Week at a higher rate than students with more body fat.’ A body fat percentage in the range of 10-15% is recommended to improve performance and reduce the risk of injury.

How fit do you have to be to make it through BUD/S?

Be able to run 3-miles in less than 19 minutes and 4-miles in less than 27 minutes.
Perform a 300-yard shuttle run in less than 60 seconds
Swim 1000m with fins quicker than 17 minutes
Be tall and lean with a body fat percentage between 10-15%

Are your employees satisfied at work?

As a manager, the job satisfaction of the people in my team is important. If I am honest, it is more to do with the psychological need to get one with people and my in-built desire as a teacher to develop those whose careers I am responsible for than it is about productivity. But employee satisfaction is closely correlated with positive business outcomes; data between 1984 and 2009 suggests that companies on the ‘100 best companies to for work in America’ earned 2.1% higher stock returns than the industry averages.

A 2019 Siad Business School study using Gallop data coving nearly two million employees across seventy-three countries showed a significant, strong link between employee satisfaction and corporate performance. The study measured four business outcomes; customer loyalty, employee productivity, profitability, and staff turnover. The researchers found that the higher the satisfaction of staff, the lower the staff turnover and higher customer loyalty. The correlation was weaker with productivity and profitability, but they were still linked.

Ultimately, higher wellbeing at work is positively correlated with more business-unit level profitability.
Krekel et al.

How to improve employee satisfaction

The basics matter, like job security, opportunities for development and progression, and fair compensation and benefits all need to be present. If these things are in place, one of the simplest ways to make employees happier is to produce a well-run company where staff are treated as people. Keep employees consulted and informed about company plans, provide them with clear goals and objectives, foster psychological safety, and follow periods of intense work and long hours by quieter times for recovery.

One quick activity to take from Biz Stone that makes a big difference to my teams work satisfaction is emailing a short weekly update. Writing around 350-450 words or producing a three-minute video at the end of the week summarising things people should know keeps them informed and connected to what is going on. Give it a go, set up a read counter, and get some feedback.

If in doubt, follow the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”