Maffetone Method...what's your experience with it?

palouserider

I do, hills are for walking. However, short hills I'll run up but anything longer than say 20 Yards/meters is a walk break. Make no mistake about walking up hills though, if you have not practiced some good power walking, they will put a serious hurt on you. Same level of exertion, Different set of muscles.

Chaser, you don't really do

Chaser, you don't really do Maffetones method anyway, but more a Chaser variant. I would call it Chasers way or something like that. If I remember correctly from everything I've read, he says you shouldn't do any anaerobic work while doing his method. Chasers method has him doing half aerobically and half anaerobically.

Today I went for a run with Mike on Wildwood Trail. The first two miles was horrible and I had to pull my bi*** card and throw on the huaraches. My feet couldn't warm up because I couldn't run long enough to get the blood flowing and my feet were killing me with all the gravel, wet, and cold. After walking nearly all of the first two miles and feeling completely depressed because I was wasting a rare opportunity of running on a trail I said eff this and took off running. My heart rate was mostly in the 160's and I felt great and alive. I don't get to run on trails much because normally I am pushing a stroller so I didn't want to waste this rare trail opportunity by walking. In that first two miles of walking I nearly turned around to walk back to the car ready to leave because it was pointless to be out and then have to walk the stinking trail. Not a lot of fun.

I will continue trying to do the maffetone thing, but on the roads where theres not so many ups and downs. My area that I normally run has a mile downhill to leave my place so I always have a mile uphill to come back up at the end. Maybe I'll just walk the last mile as my cool down...

Nick, I think Chaser is using

Nick, I think Chaser is using Maffetone for training but using HADD for the tests. It is interesting to see what the progress is at higher heart rates occasionally.

Oh, I swear he said he was

Oh, I swear he said he was doing so much time at a low heart rate, so much time at another, and so on and so forth. I swear he said it averages out to the heart rate he is supposed to be at for maff. Maybe my memory is bad...

I know I'm coming to this

I know I'm coming to this party 15+ pages late, but I just started incorporating the Maffetone Method into my training. All I can say is Holy $#@! !! If figured somewhere between 127-132 bpm might be a bit low for my current fitness level, but, dayum is it hard to keep that level consistently for 1.5 hours spinning on my trainer. As far as running, I have to run a 9:20 pace, which takes a lot of patience.

I recently got the Mittleman

I recently got the Mittleman book, and although the content is good, I really found the running and nutrition parts the most interesting.

I agree with what you say about varying the figures, but in his latest? book, maffetone does still use the 180-age as the starting point, with adjustments for illness, medication or continuous training over a period of time. I am under the impression that he is still saying take 1 bpm off for each year you age, unless of course, you have trained consistantly for two years, then you can add 5 bpm. Is that not the case?

Some of the best threads I have read on the subject, with some people getting incredible results, involved working in the range of maf-10 to maf HR, so for me, at 43, is comes out at 127-137bpm.

Mittleman says the same, and has that as his MEP zone, but also 20 bpm below this as his MAP zone, so he appears to be preaching the benefits of even lower heart rates than maffetone.

I am seeing benefits after a mere 4 weeks on this training, I feel better, and eating more heathily and am convinced that this low heart rate training will work.

When I plateau, I'll add some speedwork for a while.

theshortwhiteguy wrote: If

Hey Shorty

Those numbers are probably too low, period. How old are you? 135 132 is around the lowest that anyone in good health/fitness needs to go, the age drop-off isn't set in stone. You don't subtract one point after every birthday, either. You can kind of feel into it and make adjustments every five years or so ... Phil Maffetone does leave room for intuition and subjective tweaking of his formula.

Everyone who's interested in this stuff should really do him/herslef a favor and go straight to the source:

http://philmaffetone.com/home.cfm

Sign-up and read his newsletters and forum entries. You can post questions and he does get around to answering them personally, but he monitors his website and is a pretty busy dude.

Also, another book that I got a lot out of:

Stu Mittleman, Slow Burn

There are a lot of similar books out there, but this is the only one I've got (other than Maffetone's first book). And Maff is the original.

Wild Runner wrote: in his

yeah, for sure, that's the formula. But he writes in other places that no, you don't just automatically drop a point every birthday, and I'm pretty sure there's a five-year guideline in there somewhere - and that's just a guideline. The MAF test is probably the best way to judge progress and make adjustments (I'm pretty sure that's what Maff himself would say).

I have to admit to not reading Middleton's book for a couple years and am not so up on the specifics. But I still feel confident in recommending it, though

He does wander off into no-man's land a little, but his basic approach is a good enhancement to Maffetone. I remember having quite a few 'ah-hah' moments while reading Slow Burn - moments when Maff's ideas chrystallized for me, based on Middleton's wording more than anything.

Btw, this article from the

Btw, this article from the front page should be interesting to anyone reading this thread:

http://barefootrunners.org/story/joint-and-tissue-repair-enough-make-you-gag-dr-stephen-gangemi#comment-50781

just thought I'd toss that out there ...

@ Willie_gUsing's Phil's

@ Willie_g

Using's Phil's numbers and my age as a starting point I would be at 180-43=137bpm. But, technically I have a major disease (Nephrogenic Diabetes Insipidus) and I take a Potassium Chloride supplement and Triamterene/HCTZ daily, thereby subtracting a further 10 points. Even though I have been recovering from injury that may have kept me out of running, I continued to keep my fitness level at around 85-90%, so I didn't subtract another 5 points.

My conclusion is it is much, much, much harder for me to utilize the Maffetone concept at my fitness level - it takes a lot of patience! I get Phil's method and I'm on board with it, but it will take time for me to back off an easier (and shorter) bpm of 140-145 workout versus a slower methodical approach, which means I have to undue 25 years of training philosophy and muscle memory for this to work. My plan is to wear an hrm while I spin in my shed (with 2-3 layers of winter gear), because this will be the easiest way to keep track of bpm and consistently work within "the zone". As for running, I never cared for wearing the hrm, so I will have to train by feel and time. Since I definately am registered to run a marathon on 3/24, the next several months will be dedicated to the Maffetone Method.

BFwillie_g wrote:Wild Runner

good info there, I have taken a look on his forum, not a lot of posts, but will go through it.



Here is a REALLY long thread which is interesting. This is from 2006/7 and is a follow on from an older thread with same people.



I can post the older stuff if anyone has the inclination to read hundreds of pages of posts

http://www.coolrunning.com/forums/Forum6/HTML/022020-35.shtml

http://www.coolrunning.com/forums/Forum6/HTML/018553-8.shtml



btw. how have you progressed training this way?

I think I may be the source

I think I may be the source of that coolrunnings link, I've posted it a few times other places

Jesse Leitner was the one who turned me onto this stuff in the first place. I have a few posts in that thread, too, but under a different name. I just asked some questions, didn't have anything to add to the convo. That was a good forum until it got assimilated by the Borg at ESPN, btw.

I did really well with it, for my own goals which were mainly recovering from severe overtraining. Problem is, I've learned that overtraining never really goes away. Once the adrenals are pushed to that level, they over-react quickly as soon as I do something stupid. And right now, I'm feeling it again ... gotta buy a new HRM after all.

OK - I got a hrm.  Used it

OK - I got a hrm. Used it yesterday for a half hour and today for 45 minutes. I found out that I am out-of-shape, but I expected that - haven't been running much lately. Another thing I found out was that I could talk and breath through my nose at 140 bpm at a

Lee,Phil Maffetone says

Lee,

Phil Maffetone says clearly in his book that the formula of 180-age does not work for people over 65.

Because we are ornery

Because we are ornery cusses???

Just picked up TBBOETR and it

Just picked up TBBOETR and it doesnt lie when it says its Big! Still got to get the HRM, but its going to take me some time to read it anyway. I am slow at reading and it doesnt have pictures

lparker wrote: According to

Those numbers come from your partial understanding of the Maff system. After about age fifty, you either level it off or even start adding numbers, I forget exactly. But, from my understanding, 132 is about the lowest anyone with good health and fitness needs to go.

But ... you haven't actually done any to begin with ;-)

Well, then, training for me

Well, then, training for me at a hr of between 140-150 is about right....I can do it by instinct without buying the book. OK, I'm back on a modified Maffetone!

Has anyone seen any

Has anyone seen any significant improvements beyond what they expected by using downhills for increased leg speed?

Luckily, I have a treadmill that allows me to lift the rear end to give an decline, I am guessing about 1-1.5deg. Sure makes you run a lot faster for the same HR. I am thinking of including 2-3 or these per week to see how it goes. The benefit of low HR training with the ability to run 'fast' in the early stages