Bottom-Up vs Top-Down Endurance Training
I’ve been on a 90’s country music kick lately. I’m not sure why, but for some reason I love dipping back into the sweet, sweet sounds of Kenny Chesney, Shania Twain, Keith Urban, and…Diamond Rio.
Diamond Rio, specifically, has been inspiring to me as a coach because of one song in particular: “Meet In The Middle”. If you’re unaware of this gem I’d encourage you to preview the following:
While the gentlemen of Diamond Rio may have been singing about two young lovers finding their way to a shady rendezvous, they could just as well have been talking about using two different approaches to endurance training that ultimately result in the same goal of “meeting in the middle” and helping an athlete achieve equal dosing of both speed and endurance.
See what I did there?
Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up: An Overview
To help visualize this entire thought process, imagine a triangle:
On the top of the triangle, we have our short, fast, explosive-type work. As we progress towards the base, we have our slower, more sustained-type work. Somewhere in the middle of those two extremes sits our goal distance, be that a 5k, a mile, or a half-marathon. Another way to think about this is that, regardless of your event, you will always have paces that are faster (top of the triangle) and slower (bottom of the triangle) that you will use to refine your training. The question becomes “where do I start?” To answer that, we need to determine what kind of athlete we are (or are working with).
Athlete Archetypes
When working with an athlete on a specific endurance goal, the first stepping stone is figuring out the underlying physiology of said athlete as well as their training preferences and what they are most likely to respond to. Generally speaking, athletes will fall into one of two “buckets”:
Speed/Power: athletes who have a history of resistance training, can exhibit speed and explosiveness, but burn out after sustained work
Endurance/Stamina: athletes with more of an aerobic background who can sustain output for extended periods of time but struggle with powerful, explosive expressions of strength or speed
I can’t emphasize enough that this simplified approach to athlete categorization is intentionally generalized. The whole idea here is to create a starting point from which we can begin our endurance training prescriptions. If, after a few weeks, you find that the athlete isn’t responding the way you might have thought, don’t be afraid to change things up.
Athlete 1: Speed/Power
These athletes have spent more time developing strength, explosiveness, and speed. Typically they come from a gym-based background and can be relatively new to running. Conversely, they might have an extensive track background but are limited to sprints or shorter-distance events. Oftentimes they carry more muscle, though this isn’t always the case.
Because these athletes tend to favor shorter bursts of effort (i.e. a set of squats), we start them at the top of the triangle and work our way down.
Athlete 2: Endurance/Stamina
These athletes have spent more time building an aerobic base by focusing on endurance and sustainability. Unafraid of longer bouts of effort, these guys won’t bat an eye when you tell them to run for 1-3 hours on a Saturday. On the flip side, they may be completely oblivious to the differences between a back squat and a deadlift. Oftentimes…though not always…they are leaner and lighter.
Because these athletes tend to favor longer efforts, we start them at the bottom of the triangle and work our way up.
The Training Process
Top-Down: “Speed First, Endurance Later”
When we start at the top of the triangle and work our way down, the overarching goal is to establish a fast pace and then work to sustain it as we progressively increase volume/duration to the athlete’s tolerance. Typically this will take the form of intervals, oftentimes with plenty of rest in between so that the athlete can recover and repeat the same pace. Remember…these guys usually aren’t used to this kind of thing!
On the extreme end, for athletes who really have never run before, we can autoregulate the rest interval using phrases like “rest as needed” or “rest to full recovery”. For folks with a bit more experience, we might create a 1:1 work:rest ratio by saying something like “rest as long as it takes you to complete each interval.” An example interval session might look like this:
6x 200m @ fast pace. Rest as needed between intervals.
Note that there isn’t a specific pace here. That is intentional. Unless I have an athlete who has a solid foundation of running, OR we have a specific goal pace in mind (i.e. for an ACFT), we can be a bit loose with our pacing prescriptions at the start. Obviously this will get more specific as we get closer to our event, but at the beginning the goal is to build a foundation and pacing is less important. Diving into a conversation about pace prescriptions using autoregulation is probably too much for this article, so we’ll leave that for another time.
As the athlete begins to show competency and the ability to sustain output at shorter distances, we can start to increase the length of the intervals. In this example, because we started with 200m repeats, we might stretch that out to 400m or 600m depending on our athlete, our timeline, and our goals.
A sample week for a Top-Down approach might look something like this:
Keep in mind that we’re just looking at the “running” side of the equation here. Interspersed within these sessions would be things like resistance training and mobility work.
The take-home point here is that because this athlete prefers and will likely respond better to speed work early on, our “frequency scale” tilts in that direction…giving us two speed days and one endurance day to start.
The goal outcome is that the athlete builds speed first, then converts it to endurance for race performance.
Bottom-Up: “Endurance First, Speed Later”
Now, given what we just learned about the Top-Down approach, the opposite direction should already be somewhat obvious. For our endurance-biased athletes, the job early on is to focus on the preexisting aerobic base while layering in touches on not only speed work, but also appropriate resistance training. I emphasize the resistance training piece here because, more often than not, these athletes haven’t spent a ton of time generating force in the gym and as a result have a hard time generating speed and power on the track. Getting stronger and getting faster are typically complementary pursuits, and thus it makes sense to pay close attention to this piece of the puzzle with these athletes.
One of the tools I like to use quite a bit with these athletes is “surges” at the tail end of a long run. An example might look something like this:
60 min Zone 2 run. Finish with 30s “fast but fun” surges with 30s jog between each
It’s nothing more than a pick-up or a “sprint,” but since it comes at the tail end of a longer run there is a bit of fatigue built up and we don’t have to worry about the athlete destroying themselves. Over time, these surges might progress towards an earlier point in the run (with less fatigue) and then, eventually, towards an entirely separate sprint/interval session.
Speaking of interval sessions, whereas the Top-Down athletes started with short intervals and made them longer, the Bottom-Up athletes do the opposite. Intervals for these athletes might look more like mile repeats that progress into 1200’s, then 800’s, then eventually fast 200’s or even shorter. Remember, the purpose of this trajectory is to introduce speed slowly as the athletes improve their ability to display and sustain high power outputs.
A sample training week for a Bottoms-Up athlete might look something like this:
This is intentionally broad; however, the theme should be as recognizable with this athlete archetype as it was with the previous one. We bias our frequency towards the type of sessions the athlete is comfortable with and slowly inject speed and power over time as we work towards our goal event.
Basically we build endurance first, then layer on speed for race day performance.
The Finish Line
As with any blog-type discussion on the nuances of training, we’re leaving quite a few stones unturned and quite a few rabbit holes left unexplored. The idea here is to give a generalized look at the differences in training between two types of athlete. COULD you put both a speed and endurance athlete on a Top-Down progression? Sure…but you’d be leaving a lot of progress on the table and potentially exposing someone to a greater risk of injury and burnout.
To put a bow on it, here’s a nice chart explaining the key differences over an extended series of training phases:
With any training plan, it’s important to build feedback mechanisms into your prescriptions so that you get a strong sense of whether or not you’re going in the right direction with the right stimuli. This example is no different. Get an athlete started on a progression that seems right based on the information in front of you, and then refine over time as more information em