NSM for fast twitch types
My history is as a football player who turned into a 200m runner in my early 30’s, running low 22’s. Not super fast but still relatively quick for someone who didn’t start athletics until their 30’s. 200m was my best event and the further the distance got the slower my time was comparatively.
Have been doing NSM for around 12 months and had really good results. Consistently running 80km a week.
Dropped 8min off HM, 3:30min off 10km and 1:30 off 5km.
This year though I’ve stagnated. It’s honestly felt like I’m running with a limiter on when I race.
In training everything was good, running the fastest rep times since starting NSM with HR very controlled and under LTHR.
It’s just when I push to extended times at race pace, my HR spikes and I blow up. It’s like I can’t clear the extra lactate. 5km time was nearly a minute off my PB and 10km time 90 seconds behind my PB.
So I started to look at alternatives, got Bakken’s book, added more intensity via 45/15 and pushing the intensity in some sessions. Not true VO2 work but letting HR get up past LTHR.
Thinking I needed to push past the threshold sometimes as Bakken alludes to in his book.
This got my 10km time back to within 20 seconds with about 4 weeks of training. Essentially I just sharpened up.
Issue is I now think I have gone too far the other way and have started to notice small signs of over training. Muscle tone not recovering in time for next session, and inconsistent sessions.
I think I’ve spent too much time in the zone 5-10 beats above LTHR, which I feel is a grey zone. Above threshold but below the really hard VO2 stuff, sort of a no man’s land.
I have another 10km in 12 days and then a HM about 6 weeks after that.
After the 10km, I want to go back to sub t work but with an X factor session just once a week.
The goal will to be very conservative with the sub t work and push the boundaries a little on the X factor sessions.
Have any other FT type runners had any experience with this?