Link of the Day: Ernst van Aaken — Bonkers or Simply Ahead of His Time?
I nerd out on historical training methods of past running giants. Ernst van Aaken is one of them. He was a German sports physician and came to be known as the “Running Doctor.” He was the originator of the Long Slow Distance (LSD) method or what he called “Pure Endurance” training which advocated for high mileage at very slow speeds.
Today’s link comes from the andrewrenfree.com blog. This post gives a good run down and introduction of van Aaken’s thoughts and methods. Van Aaken’s philosophy has so influenced modern training practice of elite and recreational runners alike it is something I think all coaches and runners should be familiar — if they’re not already.
Enjoy. | jm
Ernst van Aaken: Bonkers or simply ahead of his time?
I like reading old coaching & training literature, and have a good collection of the classic texts on training for endurance events. However, one stands out as being particularly interesting because although on first reading it may come across as very ‘extreme’ (absolutely bonkers in some respects), to some extent the author may be considered to have been proposing ideas years ahead of his time.
The book I refer to is The Van Aaken Method, which is not really even a ‘proper’ book – it is actually a collection of separate articles translated into English from the authors native German. Ernest Van Aaken was a German medical doctor who became convinced that long duration low intensity endurance exercise in combination with a diet consisting of very small quantities of minimally processed foods was the route to good health. Although he was more concerned about health than performance, a number of his athletes achieved remarkable success through following his methods.
With regards to the exercise part of the Van Aaken method, then the recommendations are incredibly simple. He summarized them as:
Run daily, run slowly
Run many miles, many times your racing distance if you are track runner
Run no faster during tempo runs than you would in a race
He also gave more detailed advice in that “endurance mileage” is related to “tempo mileage” in a ratio of approximately 10-20:1. In this respect his recommendations seem very similar to more recent proposals by Stephen Seiler (http://www.sportsci.org/2009/ss.htm) and Carl Foster (http://journals.humankinetics.com/ijspp-current-issue/ijspp-volume-10-issue-1-january/in-quest-of-the-unified-field-theory-of-exercise-training). Van Aaken gives very few precise details of exactly how this ratio is achieved. Within the book he suggests a 5k runner could run e.g 12x400m or 5x1000m at target race pace (with full recoveries), but elsewhere also suggests the same benefits could be achieved with one ‘tempo run’ at the end of each days endurance run. At the 2009 ECSS Conference in Oslo after a presentation at one of the symposia I asked the speaker if he had any opinions on whether it is preferable to do all the quality work in one dedicated session, or to spread it evenly throughout the week. His response was that he thought it best to do it all in one go in order to allow full recovery from the quality work before repeating. I can fully understand this point of view, however I’m not so sure exactly what my opinion on this issue is at the moment.
Another point that Van Aaken continually emphasizes throughout his writing is that training should be ‘playful’. At one stage he says:
“Training that takes a playful form…constantly regenerates the organism, while continuous repetition of near-maximal stresses…become dangerous because of psychic stress”
Interestingly, he noted that the athlete who trains too intensively:
“suffered insomnia, nervous irritation, and also more and more lacked the will to train”.
At the same 2009 Oslo Conference I referred to earlier, another speaker gave a fascinating presentation on Long Slow Distance Training. If I recall correctly he seemed to suggest that he did not know exactly how it worked but did propose that it may have had some effect on the brain that allowed it to tolerate higher levels of physical stress. He also quoted Joe Henderson’s 1969 book ‘Long Slow Distance: the Human Way to Train’ (http://www.joehenderson.com/longslowdistance/) when saying “LSD is not so much a training method as a recovery method”. When reading Henderson’s writings he frequently refers to Van Aaken’s work himself.
I don’t intend getting too much into the details of his dietary recommendations other than to say that he was recommending training with low glycogen stores and very much suggesting that the need for a high carbohydrate intake has been exaggerated (I’m staying out of that debate).
As stated at the start, some of his suggestions were frankly ‘bonkers’ (e.g. 5 training sessions a day, 2-3 hours sleep a night, and 1000 calories a day for hard training athletes). Nonetheless, he did suggest that the most important factor determining the extent to which an athlete improves is the quantity of the training performed. There seems little outlined in his general proposals that do not appear to stand the test of time (he also refuses to write sample schedules, something that I like very much).
Read the original andrewrenfree.com blog post here.