From “Noob Gains” to True Gains
Enjoy this period of your training when the gains take care of themselves (if you let them)
by Chris Bagg
Welcome to Noob Gains! It’s a lovely place to be. “Noob gains” refers to the months (or years, sometimes) as your body changes to meet the novel challenge of swimming, biking, running, rowing, or skiing in an endurance context. It’s a time of fantastic improvement and a lot of joy—as long as you don’t stumble into some of the pitfalls that can plague this period of your endurance career.
Let’s back up a little bit and explore how your body deals with and adapts to physical stress. Are you old enough to remember back before you began swimming, cycling, running, rowing, skiing, or doing any activity that required extended periods of heavier breathing? If you can dig far back enough into the recesses of deep memory, you might remember that you got winded fairly often: picking up your kids, running for a subway, or making it up three flights of stairs at the Apple Store parking garage without pausing to catch your breath.
Why was that? Well, you hadn’t set up your body to deal with those stressors. The load was too high, so you got out of breath. When you are out of breath and need to stop what you are doing, that is a high-intensity movement. Yeah, seriously, three flights of stairs is to you what a 200 meter all-out sprint is to an endurance athlete.
Maybe realizing that fact is what made you decide to start exercising, but whatever the reason was you decided enough was enough, and you were going to run for that subway and not have to bend over, grabbing at your knees like a gassed basketball player (and remember—that basketball player has been doing something strenuous for a while, not a short jog along the platform).
So you recently started running, or swimming, cycling, skiing, rowing, or some combination of all of those. Within a few weeks little tasks were easier. You noticed fewer moments of running out of breath. You kept training, and things kept improving. “Is this truly what I feared?” you asked yourself. “Some regular, minor discomfort for better daily living?”
Noob Gains are amazing, real, and dangerous. I promise I’ll get to the dangerous part. Why amazing? If you’re a seasoned endurance athlete, you know that improving takes a fair amount of time, effort, and singular focus. After you’ve raised your baseline fitness to a certain point, you need to start training individual parts of your engine in order to see any gains. Your endurance engine has several different elements, which the graph depicts below.
The red line is the demand of your chosen event, in this case our intrepid athlete wants to finish their first 5k, and they want to do so in under 30 minutes. What you’re looking at above is called a “Pace-Duration Curve,” where there is a pace on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal axis. As you train, you will begin to develop more gears, and if the time range is shorter (like five seconds or one minute) you can probably go much faster than you’d be able to go at a longer time frame, like 20 minutes or one hour. These time frames will roughly correspond to different parts of your body’s energy systems, with faster gears in the top left area of the graph and slower gears in the bottom right, reflecting the simple truth that you can hold slower paces for longer periods of time than you can hold faster paces. The red line is our “goal” athlete who can run about 8:30/mile or 7 MPH for 25-30 minutes, which will get them to the finish line in the time that they are aiming for.
A well-rounded endurance athlete will want to address every energy system as they are training: endurance, sub-threshold, threshold, vo2max, anaerobic capacity, sprinting/raw speed, and skills/technique. But when you are well-trained, one part of your engine doesn’t sit there happily while you work on other parts. If you want to be a better sprinter, then you’ll have to focus on it and it’s likely you won’t be able to train your vo2max or threshold—you’d have to build a week that included every part of your engine, and that would be a) exhausting and b) confusing as all get out to your body—what are they trying to do? Your physiology will be asking as you do a sprint set Tuesday, vo2max set Wednesday, threshold set Thursday, and then collapse into a hospital bed Friday before gamely heading out on the weekend to do monster endurance rides. The takeaway here is that once you are well-trained, you need to pick and choose what you are working on. It’s like growing up and realizing that you can no longer do everything and that an adult life requires choice.
Noob gains, on the other hand, do not require choice. Our newbie athlete is the blue line, and you can see that NONE of the athlete’s abilities presently come close to the demands of the event. The demand of the event outstrips your abilities right now. ANY kind of training hits ALL of the energy systems. If you are sedentary or near sedentary, going for a five minute jog will stress your endurance, sub-threshold, threshold, vo2max, anaerobic capacity, raw speed, and technique capabilities. It is the only time in your endurance career when intervals are “magical” because literally any kind of training improves every part of your engine. Let’s look at that graph again, and you can see that our athlete, after several months of training, has built their engine to meet the needs of their first 5k. Before every aspect of the 5k was beyond their physical capabilities, but now they can run the distance without walking or stopping, and they’re getting close to their goal of being able to run 10:00/miles for extended periods of time, so the speed component is almost there.
Some aspects of noob gains, however, are short lived, and this is where we get to the dangerous part. Many companies in the endurance industry know about noob gains, and they know how to exploit them for profit. If you sign up for a training program that promises incredible results with a low number of training hours, it will behoove you to remember that the word “incredible” literally means “not credible” or “not believable.” Many of these companies, which promise the promised land through shorter and more intense workouts, are counting on you to to begin their program, see the benefits that come from noob gains, and believe it is something special about the program rather than something that is the opposite of special: anyone would benefit from any kind of program at this point in your journey. But they are preying on your desire to achieve your goals in the most time-efficient manner because, as with most adults, you probably have a life, a family, a job, relationships, and other parts of your life that you need to juggle.
Unfortunately, after a relatively short amount of time, you leave the noob gains area. If the program is a low volume, high intensity program you’ll leave the noob gains area soon. One trait that improves rapidly when you begin training or add high intensity work to your regimen is blood volume. Your body senses that you’re going to be putting new demands upon it that require more oxygen getting to your working muscles. Blood is what delivers that oxygen, and if you have more blood volume your body can meet the demand more easily. Our bodies are fantastic at finding ways to overcome the obstacles we place in front of it. But blood volume is a relatively rapid adaptation (happens in weeks, not years), and it levels off fairly soon, too, probably right after you’ve made your second monthly subscription payment to one of these programs.
With the leveling off of the blood volume, you’ll also see a leveling off of your improvements. “What’s happening?” you might ask yourself. “This was working so well a month ago?” Influenced by marketing and our culture’s toxic obsession with ideas such as “no pain, no gain” and “HTFU” and “suffering,” you decide that the problem is not the program or its physiological grounding, but instead is…you. Pushed by the broken work ethic of our culture, you buckle down and work harder, adding more high intensity sessions to your plate until, another six or eight weeks later, your body cries out for a break, usually in the language of injury, sickness, or burnout, since your body cannot sit down and have a rational discussion with you.
Noob gains, not treated carefully and respectfully, can be dangerous. The answer? Don’t sign up for any kind of program at this point, even ours, at least for six months or so. Grab a basic training plan off the Internet, one that is clearly marketed towards beginners and seems to understand everything we’ve pointed out above (we’ve got a few good ones over on our Training Plans page), and if you have any questions about training or about simply getting started with endurance sport, you can always book a free training consultation with us.