But you can’t keep doing loads of 400m races. Now of course in the coaching community there is a growing movement around specificity, rightly so! The more you do something exactly, the better you get at (see works by Bondarchuk as an example). See also Nike Offers Customization with Air Pegasus+ 26 Running Shoe On ĭuring the 400m race these levels slowly rise as the body produces the energy and biproducts and tries to keep the engine running, there is a steady rise from the very start of the race and from as early as the 100m the diffusion from the muscles to the blood starts to exceed capacity (a few factors are involved in this and how we can support this part of the race but that’s another article) and the subsequent neuromuscular fatigue starts to hit! So what does this mean? To clarify, Blood Lactate will rise for the next several minutes after intense exercise as the lactate is diffused from the muscle to the blood which is why the post run sick feeling happens, as you can see in the image, the blood lactate falls and the blood lactate rises at the end of the event. Now as you can see the lactate levels measured (from which we calculate the rise of Ions and subsequent acidosis) at the end of the 400m in this instance are at approximately 12mmol and rising to 16mmol measured via the blood. Now the level of these “Ions” in the body can both be trained to be lower and to be tolerated, in fact most of the time the same training will do both. And what those of us who have done enough training to encounter it, would call Butt lock, Heavy legs and “where’s the nearest bin to throw up”! In fact the build-up of H+ and also phosphate ions begin to inhibit the contractile ability of muscles (reducing the power output ability) via mechanisms that effect the cross bridging of sarcomeres. You see this H+ build up and subsequent change in PH level of the body (hence the afore mentioned “Lactic Acid” / Acidosis of the muscles), is believed to be a main factor in the very performance limiting fatigue experienced at the end of the 400m race. – Rick Mitchell on 400 meter Training, Workouts and Peaking for Major Meets – Why you Need 7-10 Weeks of Lactic Acid Tolerance Workouts (Plus Special & Speed Endurance) And its subsequent cost in what the world calls “Lactic Acid” (I’m not a physiology snob so we will stick with it) but most importantly for this article it’s the increase in hydrogen Ions (H+) that is the issue, which can be monitored by measuring the Blood Lactate levels of athletes and the increase in muscle acidity.
The main limiting energetic factor in the 400m will be the Glycolytic system and its contribution to providing the required energy.
Now, you could say goal achieved, as you have taken the athlete to the point where they have accrued a large amount of fatigue and acidosis that should stimulate some level of adaptation. Well, the problem with this is very simple, we have gotten lazy over the years as coaches and simply prescribed antiquated training sessions and let the athlete run until they can’t complete it. Well in all honesty, you already do it! It’s essentially just interval training! Its performing a rep in a controlled manner at a given intensity to systematically increase the byproducts within the body, and after a set amount of recovery performing another rep and layering another layer of fatiguing byproducts on top of that already created, repeated until the desired effect has been reached.
The main part of this presentation looks at some of the bioenergetics of 400m competition and training and attempts to conceptualise some training theory, based around Lactate Stacking. A look at their differences and similarities and why many roads “ can” indeed lead to Rome (just some are a little better paved than others). This Blog article was written by Stewart “Stew” Marshall (on Twitter: of this discussion form part of my personal presentation called “My Rabbit Hole of 400” a work that started many years ago in its thought process and more recently is part of a bigger slide deck, covering the many areas of 400m training theory such as Traditional, Long to Short (isn’t that traditional? Hmmmm) Short to Long and of course Concurrent Theory, Critical Zone, even covering the recent buzzword “Polarised”.