It’s Better to Be Undertrained than Overstrained
Bowerman's Training Principles
1. It’s better to be undertrained than overstrained.
It was Bowerman’s belief that many coaches, albeit well-intending, work their runners too hard.
Bowerman was friends with Arthur Lydiard, but not a fan of his training methods, namely the high mileage marathon-style base phase. “Running one hundred miles a week is ridiculous and will only give a guy sore legs. And he’ll probably be too tired to study as well,” Bowerman said.
In the fall of 1963, Bowerman conducted an experiment on his Oregon runners to determine the effects of successive hard training days with no days for recovery. After a week of continuously hard training, all his athlete’s performances dropped off exponentially and the need for rest became apparent. Bill Dellinger, then a 29-year-old grad student, continued through for 2 weeks of daily hard training. By the start of the third week he was exhausted and needed to take 10 days of rest to recover.
This internal experiment reinforced Bowerman’s tendency to air on the side of undertraining rather than overstraining his runners.
Hard running (meaning long or intense running, or a combination of both) disturbs the homeostatic state of an athlete. This disturbance causes fatigue and an acute reduction in the athlete’s work capacity. This is the first step in the supercompensation cycle. This is the part every athlete and coach gets right: do work. The second phase is characterized by marked fatigue and a pronounced process of recovery. This is the part of the cycle many struggle with: take enough time to rest and repair. The result is an increase in the athlete’s work capacity.
However, if post-exercise recuperation is interrupted prematurely with additional hard running then the supercompensation cycle is compromised and excessive, or chronic, fatigue accumulation sets in. This can lead to overtraining syndrome, burnout, and/or injury.
Bowerman observed “Doing too much hard work eventually leads to injury. Once you’re hurt, it’s very hard to get well.”
Like all coaches, he didn’t want his runners to get hurt. So his injury prevention tool of choice was undertraining his runners.
In the short run, they'd have less impressive weekly totals in their training logs, but in the long run, they had fewer blank pages from days missed.