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Here's the truth about HIIT and Zone 2 debate:
You can improve your performance or mitochondrial health or whatever metric using either. Both work. About equally well.
We know this. Look at the history of track.
Bannister ran 3:59 on a dirt track 70 years ago doing mostly 5 days a week of 400m repeats.
Harold Norpoth was one of the best 1500 - 5k runners in the world just a few years later with his training being nearly all very slow runs with just very small touches of speed.
So when someone says you HAVE to do HIIT or Zone 2 because it will improve X, Y, Z...the truth is you can get there even doing extremes.
But...
There are tradeoffs. Both in terms of time, but also sustainability.
One of the reasons that 5-7 days of intervals fell out of favor is: it was crazy hard to sustain without getting injured/burned out. Careers were shorter back then.
Second: We learned that interval training was more effective when you build a robust base before hand, then you needed less of the intense stuff to maximize things.
In other words: sequencing mattered.
What we've learned over 100+ years of training history is if you want to optimize, you need both, in the right mixture.
And for the vast majority of runners, that means: a lot of easy with 2 days a week of varied harder workouts. And those workouts are periodized, depending on the training outcome.
So... if you want to do nearly ALL Zone 2...you can get most of the way there if you do enough of it.
If you want to do ALL HIIT, you can get most of the way there if you do enough of it.
But...we've moved past such extreme dicohtomies in the 1950s in training for a reason.
This is one reason why I like looking at historical trends over science when it comes to these debates. Training trends function as a kind of natural selection. You figure out what worked a bit better, and that generally sticks around.
In the scientific debates you just get but X improved Y factor in a contrived isolated 6 week training block better than this contrived training protocol. It doesn't tell us much practically. It's why training methods in elite endurance athletes are a decade or two ahead of the latest scientific recommendation.
It's why no one trains like Roger Bannister or Harold Norpath right now...There are some elements of their training left...but it's refined.
So whenever someone says you don't need X, Y, Z....or you only need A, B, C....there may be a hint of truth technically. That you can get a large % of gains through singular stressors....but it's like turning the clock back to the 1950s in terms of training.
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