What to Do When You Don’t Have Time for 80/20 Training

Progressing fitness when life gets in the way

80/20 training is a staple in endurance training circles. We all know it’s hailed for giving us the best long-term success rate in athletic performance. The risk is, with all of the focus on optimized methods, that we forget how to adapt in a way that preserves good fundamentals when our situation doesn’t allow for “optimal.” 

One recent study sets context for those scenarios, a paper titled “Effects of Different Training Intensity Distribution in Recreational Runners” in Frontiers in Sport and Active Living. Luca Festa and colleagues in the Department of Neuroscience, Biomedicine and Movement Sciences at the University of Verona in Italy set out to test how essential 80/20 training really is to making progress, and their results will probably surprise you.

“...Seiler states for highly trained athletes training 10–25 h/week, polarized intensity distribution may allow maximal adaptive signaling while minimizing autonomic and hormonal stress responses and reducing the risk of overtraining (Foster, 1998; Esteve-Lanao et al., 2007).  For recreational athletes [it] is still unknown what intensity distribution is optimal or if the intensity distribution is or is not critical.”

80/20 training works if you can train for 10 to 25 hours per week, but what happens when our training schedule is upended by the rest of life?

80/20 Training Versus 40/60 Training

Festa collected a group of volunteers and distributed them into one of two training categories, which the authors called "polarized endurance training" and "focused endurance training". Before any training, all 38 volunteers completed a max-effort 2-kilometer run to benchmark fitness. Then, they did 8 weeks of training according to the structured plans that the research team had put together. In the polarized group, training was structured close to the traditional 80/20 split, with 80% of training load completed at low intensity and 20% completed at high intensity. In the focused training group, a 40/60 split was used; participants spent more than half of their training time at, or above, a moderate intensity. Researchers controlled the total training load of subjects so that the total amount of load was the same between groups. Since the 40/60 group was training harder when they were training, they spent less total time training each week than the 80/20 group. At the end of the eight weeks, every one of the volunteers was tested again with a 2000m, maximum effort run, among a few other markers of fitness changes.

Training doctrine would lead most of us to guess that the 80/20 group is likely to see the greater performance bump after the eight weeks, but we’d be wrong. Both groups saw essentially the same overall performance improvement in their 2K run times– up about 3% from what their times were before the training period.

60/40 still comes with problems

So what does that actually mean for the athlete who’s trying to get the most out of their training? If we can spend less time training with a 60/40 distribution and get the same fitness gains, then it suggests 60/40 is a more time-efficient strategy for making progress. Does that logic scale as we get better?

It’s almost a certainty in the long-term that the answer is no– for two reasons.

First, the measure of running performance used in this study was two kilometers long, or about one and a quarter miles. That’s pretty short and high-intensity compared to racing a 5K or longer. The test they chose for measuring success favors high intensity training adaptations more than common race distances, which tend to be longer.

The second problem is related to the first. One of the major pitfalls of new endurance athletes is to run to a reasonably high degree of exhaustion every time they head out the door, effectively running every workout at a very moderate effort (feels too hard to be easy, but they're too fatigued from their last run to really push). Just like in the focused group in the study, that leads to results... for a time. Eventually, performance plateaus, because the basis of long-term growth in fitness is built on the mitochondrial density and fat utilization rates that can only be maximized through a lot of time spent training.

Rather than 60/40 training supplanting 80/20, a better perspective is if we find ourselves in brief periods where our normal training schedule is disrupted, it’s probably best to concentrate our effort a bit more into the training time we have, rather than scaling everything down to keep that 80/20 ratio.

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