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For years now, I’ve had a default workout format that I rely on when I’m looking for a good hard effort that doesn’t feel that hard: the descending ladder. The details depend on how fit I am and what I’m training for, but a typical example would be 5:00, 4:00, 3:00, 2:00 (with recovery jogs lasting half the duration of the previous interval) and then 1:00 hard/1:00 easy for as many times as I feel like. There’s something about the mental and physical trajectory of these workouts that hits a sweet spot for me.
So a recent study by Filippo Vaccari and his colleagues at the University of Udine in Italy, published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, caught my eye. The study’s title talks about “optimizing oxygen consumption” and “the exponential reconstitution behaviour of D’,” but when you dig into the details, you realize it’s making a physiological argument for the magic of the…
