This problem was treated with a bit more sophistication by Harvards Lieberman in „A story of the human body“ and the corresponding nature article [0] establishing persistence hunting as an ancestoral hunting technique of homo sapien.
See figure 2b for the plot you were looking for. Running faster is less efficient but only slightly so and walking is a U-shaped curve like most mammal gaites.
It shows that in contrast to most animals, the efficiency curve of humans for running speeds is extremely flat, ie, we are about equally efficient at many different speeds, while the kind of game that we hunted was not.
The discrepancy allowed us to find a speed where we could exhaust the animal after 10-30km (as I understand) provided we were also excellent trackers.
I don't doubt the results but I cannot imagine how that can be true, I'm not fit but I've had many 20+hours hikes to the high mountain peaks but if I run to a bus stop when I'm late I'm tired beyond belief and I just cannot maintain running, have to stop
You are probably sprinting to the bus stop, not running. Running would be below your aerobic threshold, for however well you're trained, and thus should not leave you exhausted or wiped out. The general rule of thumb is that if you can't have a conversation, you're exceeding your aerobic threshold and so are exceeding your pace.
Training increases what that pace is, but ultimately no (land?) mammal can exceed their aerobic threshold for long, since there are limits to stored oxygen. Cetaceans and pinnipeds might be an interesting exception.
This is true, but just to quantify it a bit, a lot of people can run at their lactate threshold for about an hour. This isn't 'long' but may be longer than most people think.
That said, I remember doing similar 'runs to the parking lot' and being gassed when I was totally untrained despite being capable of long walks/hikes. I suspect there are even more basic adaptations one needs to be able to do these very short activities for which a more trained individual can complete anaerobically.
> a lot of people can run at their lactate threshold for about an hour.
I say this as someone incredibly out of shape, but I doubt any of those people are wiped out by running to the bus stop ;)
> I suspect there are even more basic adaptations one needs to be able to do these very short activities for which a more trained individual can complete anaerobically.
Yeah absolutely, I found it very interesting that weight training is universal in sprinters, it makes sense as metabolic training as well as the actual muscle growth.
I started trying to pay attention and do some "zone 2" training recently. I came to the sad realization that a moderate jog pushes me well over zone 2. :(
Same here! Have you found a solution? I was pretty happy with 3 miles 3-4 times per week, 10 to 11 minute pace, but apparently for me that's pushing too hard according to zone training. I tried going much slower, and even then my HR raises more slowly, but eventually gets way up there. Alternating my slowest possible jog and walking has taken all the fun out of running for the time being.
When people talk about "Zone 2" they generally do not refer to a specific % of max heart rate. The simple answer is at this volume of training (3-4 times a week 30 minutes) don't even worry about it. Just run. Zone 2 is an optimization. Can you talk while running at this pace? Can you hold a conversation? I think it's unlikely you can over-train at this volume though if you've never run maybe you ease into this over a couple of months.
Adding distance/time into your program is probably going to help, as long as you don't feel too tired/sore or that you're over-training
Consider adding interval training to your regime. That's a more time efficient way of improving your VO2MAX (which should translate to your overall performance). E.g. 1-2 minutes 90%-100%, 1-2 minutes walk/slow/jog, x3-5 (this is rough, do some reading and see what works for you).
So, I thought this might be the case. But I never got a good answer on if power zone or heart rate zone was what to pay attention to. Since I'm not competing and don't plan to, I don't really care that much. But, no reason not to try and train a bit more properly. :D
When biking, it really doesn't help that I have some silly hills surrounding the house. Even if I'm not going all out, a 10% climb takes its toll.
My ex lost 80 pounds and went from unable to run to running ultras and she found that she had to alternate between walking and running in the beginning to keep her heart rate in the lower thresholds. On the converse side, maybe integrating some strength training or speed workouts or stair climbs will help you develop a strength reservoir to make it easier to run at a low heart rate.
Now that you've recognized how gentle a low heartrate feels I'm sure a conversational pace is totally adequate for staying under your lactic threshold (but if you could sing you're going too slow!)
Kudos on that progress! I don't see myself moving to marathons anytime soon. I /think/ I could do a 5k in about 30 minutes. I would be zone 4 in heart rate for dang sure, though. :D
Supposedly this is the definition: "Zone 2 is defined as the highest metabolic output/work that you can sustain while keeping your lactate level below two millimole per liter.". Unless you can measure lactate level you just don't know what heart rate this corresponds to. The heuristic that's used is "able to have a conversation".
For a beginner a good tip is just to go a little bit easier than they think they should be going. Once you've built some sort of aerobic base your training should start including intervals and runs that push you harder.
There are two risks in pushing yourself too hard. Injury and over-training.
There should be some correlation between lactic acid levels and feeling sore. I honestly just don't worry about it. Just getting out there and doing something is better than sitting around. Listen to your body. If you're not recovering, or not sleeping properly or are too sore, dial back a little on either volume or intensity. My Garmin gives me an estimate of recovery time, you really have to work hard to stretch that recovery time into more than 48 hours (e.g. running a 10K race). You can vary your workouts between something that feels extremely easy to pushing yourself a little more.
EDIT: another thing I didn't mention is that in terms of injury you want to give your body plenty of time to build more distance. Most of your joints and other tissues take longer to adapt than cardiovascular. I think this is where people can get into potential injury situations by ramping up too fast. I personally also try to run on soft surfaces (trails etc.) since I find hard surfaces (roads) a lot more punishing.
"Zone" training is primarily a way for high mileage runners to get the physical adaptation of running with lower risk of injury on easy days. If you're running < 20 mpw there should be minimal risk of injury and you should focus on increasing mileage and not on heart rate (which is highly variable depending on the person anyway, and should be properly determined with a LT test).
I pretty much settled on what all they were saying. I was taking the exact path you outlined. Since that seems to be working fine for me, and I'm also adding weights, I figured I would wait and try again later. Probably in a year or so, if I can keep up this schedule. Good luck on your exercise!
As other people say here, 9 to 12 miles a week is unlikely to put you in need of that kind of specialization. People I know that do zone training are running 30-50 miles a week, some more.
I did hiit training for a year 3 times per week and now I struggle to get my heart rate up to that same point. My muscles give up or just can't sustain the intensity necessary.
My heart rate goes down way faster, so if I stop for 1 second (literally), my heart rate drops immediately and it takes a lot of effort for it to go back up.
I suspect at this point training in zone 2 is trivial, my body gets naturally there
TL; DR; train hard first, your heart gets stronger and brings you to zone 2 naturally?
I'm no athlete or expert, so please do your research and ignore everything I said
You might want to check yourself for conditions such as asthma in that case. Mild cases often go undiagnosed but medication makes a huge difference on the heart rate during a slow jog.
Most animals get tired running very quickly too. A cheetah, just like you, also can't sustain a run at their max speed for very long (about 30 seconds max). But when it comes to endurance, very few animals come close to us thanks to how efficient we are. A lot that comes from us being bipedal, a good amount of our muscles being slow twitch, our ability to breathe independent of our muscle usage while running, and having a very high density of sweat glands across our bodies (10 times the density of chimps) giving us an efficient and superb cooling capacity.
This is going to sound crazy, but get a Garmin watch and zone 2 train. Three years ago I couldn’t ride 5 miles on my bike. This year I completed my second Unbound 100mi. Honestly I could go a lot further if I had enough nutrition and fixed all the creature comforts like seat and glasses.
That’s because you’re using more energy per time unit, and there’s only so much that you can sustain. The article is about energy per distance unit. So to translate this: run the same distance faster, and you’ve burned about the same amount of calories, but you’re more exhausted from having to burn through the calories at a faster rate. However, from an efficiency perspective you got there faster at the same cost.
There's no contradiction here. The ability to move at a cost of X kj/km has nothing to do with sustaining a power output of Y kj/s.
Your body can be thought of as a directed graph of different pools of energy with different edge weights representing how fast you can move energy between pools, and your fitness as being your ability to move energy into the ATP pool. If you can walk a km in 10 minutes for 200 kj, or run it in 5 minutes for 200 kj, and you can produce 300 kj of ATP in 10 minutes, then you're going to run out of energy running but be able to walk indefinitely, even though both are equally efficient. (In practice the numbers are going to be different, and there are more conversions than just glucose to ATP to think about, but I think the example illustrates the point).
I often have to use arm swinging and pronouced hip movement to get myself out of the wilderness faster/easier.
I have found it to be more efficient than mindless hiking/walking. I try to loosen my gaite and keep upright when I remember to.
Also, having done extensive Taibata, squats, weight lifting, and cycling. Nothing compared to hiking (often steep terrain) for conditioning. I'm strong from the inside out and it (strength) persists for much longer than other conditioning exercises. And it's crazy enjoyable. Cycling was enjoyable (and far more painful overall) but it guarantees nothing for core strength and will typically result in repetition injuries (years of experience MTB and road).
> I don't doubt the results but I cannot imagine how that can be true, I'm not fit but I've had many 20+hours hikes to the high mountain peaks but if I run to a bus stop
you are probably not trained as well as our ancestors, who were consistently jog-hunting since very young ages, which translates to more efficient mind-body connection, target muscles and energy systems development, and fat to body mass ratio.
There are plenty of people who can jog for many miles and likely has higher aerobic threshold for moderate sprinting.
Try running slower? If I run 50k at 7min/km I'm not tired at all, but walking the same distance at 12min/km leaves me exhausted.
The mental model in my head sort of accounts for effort it takes just to be upright for 10 hours even if you don't cover any distance at all. Low-effort running saves me half of that energy because I spend less time upright.
I agree and contrary to what the other commenters are saying, I can walk all day on a 16-17 min/mile pace but if I bump that up to a 10-12 min/mile jog, I am completely tired by the 3-5 mile point. It’s not a full sprint, it’s a pretty slow jog and somehow that completely taps me out.
Another way to think about it--i.e. hoofed animals can only walk or sprint. Humans can jog, so as long as a human hunter can pick up the trail after the animal sprints out of sight, the jogging will eventually win out.
I was trying to help with a simplified mental model. Sorry, I thought the "another way to think about it" part was clearer than it might have been.
The linked paper in the parent comment has a graph on page 347 (page 2 of the content). The human's walk curve is substantially more efficient than the other gaits, included on the graph, which is the point I was trying to make. Humans best their caloric/distance ratios over time ("endurance hunting").
I guess the precise definition would be most ungulates, but not migratory ungulates?
> Although not extensively studied in non-humans, endurance running is unique to humans among primates, and uncommon among quadrupedal mammals other than social carnivores (such as dogs and hyenas) and migratory ungulates (such as wildebeest and horses)
Anyway I was attempting a clumsy metaphor to aid someone's understanding, not trying to be pedantic. It's easiest to compare sprinting and not-sprinting.
I'm a runner and have had a weird question, could a runner defeat a larger human in this way? Like if I found myself in mortal combat with The Rock at 260 lbs after his steroids cycle, could I just repeatedly run away and follow him (while staying out of range) until he tired out and then bonk him on the head with a rock, like a tired antelope? (No offense to The Rock, seems like a great guy)
Might explain why we aren't all musclebound and huge? Although I'm sure food availability had more influence.
Somewhat related anecdote: When a friend of mine was in college, he got into some sort of amicable debate with another friend and they decided the way to resolve it was through a boxing match. Neither of them had an ounce of boxing experience.
My friend realized before the match that just holding the gloves up and swinging punches is more tiring than you'd think. So the strategy he settled on was to just put his guard up and not attack at all. He let his friend take a bunch of swings at him until eventually the poor guy was literally too tired to hold his arms up. Then my friend started swinging and quickly won.
The Rock would be bad at persistence hunting, but it would be weird if he was so susceptible to persistence hunting. What incentive does he have to fatigue himself in this scenario? When it's you vs animal, the animal runs from you since if you catch it you kill it. The Rock could just chill and say bring it on. If you were sufficiently mobile and clever, maybe you could prevent him from reaching food and water until he's weak enough for you to attack.
Juicing is gaining a lot of legitimacy lately. Not that it’s any better for you at this point but there are a lot of bodybuilders publicly talking about it. Its being normalized pretty rapidly which is a definitely not a good thing.
If you knew how to use a sling, and The Rock didn't, you could try to make The Rock chase you by staying out of his range and slinging rocks at him. Reverse persistence hunting.
I think this sort of technique is used in boxing and MMA: play a good defense, stay out of trouble, and let the aggressor exhaust themselves until later rounds when you feel you may have a fitness advantage. I think there were good examples of this in the early days of MMA, when there was much less, if any, specialized training, techniques and strategy. It's probably much less effective now, since a well trained aggressor will know how to pace themselves too.
Short answer no. This is because what gets exhausted is aerobic capacity. When you get within striking range The Rock will still have access to fast twitch muscles & some reduced amount of glycogen for energy release. This would probably be enough to grab you and choke you out. Basically the Mountain vs the Viper fight from game of thrones.
If you were of similar size then yes. Basically being smaller really sucks in a fight. So if you can reasonably deflect the Rocks wrestling & grappling offensive you could rope a dope him causing him to gas out and then win. Higher weight MMA fighters & boxers use this tactic all the time. They let their opponent “punch themselves out” and then get off their own offense.
Nope. OP stipulated that at some point mortal combat happens and also suggests that it happens within arms length for example dropping a large rock on an even larger Rock.
Layman: skeletal muscles are expensive to maintain in terms of caloric and protein/water intake, and larger muscles are less efficient at dumping the heat that their use generates because volume increases faster than exposed surface area with muscular hypertrophy. If food and body temperature regulation were more immediate concerns than violent conflict, then the ability to gas out your opponent was probably less influential.
I've thought about this kind of scenario, bizarrely, a decent amount recently. Long story short, assuming your opponent is so strong that once you're in arms' reach, you're done, you have to be faster than said opponent not only at endurance running but also at every distance between. E.g. assuming you start off somewhat close to them, you have to sprint faster and transition into a faster endurance running pace, and at no point can you be so much slower than them at a given distance that they're able to regain any ground you made on them at a different speed.
The reason it works against deer is that they can only get rid of a certain amount of heat; once they reach their maximum temperature they are not able to continue moving.
The Rock, being human is able to exhaust at least as much heat as you, taking away from your advantage.
>The Rock, being human is able to exhaust at least as much heat as you, taking away from your advantage.
I'm not so sure about this. The Rock has only slightly more surface area than I do (due to his larger physical size); it's not a huge amount more, certainly not double. However, he has much more muscle mass than I do, probably more than double. Therefore, his surface-area/muscle-mass ratio should be lower, meaning he should have less ability to exhaust heat than me. (Muscle mass is what generates all the heat.) Therefore, over time, he should get overheated more quickly than me, though of course this depends entirely on our relative physical activity while we're trying to fight or avoid the other.
Endurance advantage is a big factor in many sports and offers a viable strategy.
The issue with your suggestion is that it's not uncommon for massive heavy athletes to also have excellent endurance too, so even if they may not catch you, they would still be the one stalking you.
I'm a big guy, 6'5", 255 (aiming for 240), plenty of muscle, and when I was a young kid and teen I cycled a _lot_. I kept cycling through my 20s, and did a tremendous amount of walking too for enjoyment. At my peak I could run a mile in just under 7 minutes. I did the 50 and 100m sprints freshman year of high school for track and won a fair amount. I was on the swim team. And despite all of that, yes, the cross country kids had more stamina than me, although I could beat them in sprints.
So, anecdotally, yeah, me vs a runner and the runner takes off? If I don't catch them within a couple of hundred yards, they're gone. I can walk or cycle at a medium pace all day, but distance runners will beat me in marathons every single time. In caveman times I'd have been the closer, the guy who catches up to the runners and finishes off the bear or tiger or elephant when it's exhausted.
Lightly-armed Athenians trapped heavily-armed Spartans in hilly terrain, and instead of fighting them in a phalanx, wore them down with a long day of hit-and-run. Hundreds of exhausted Spartans were taken alive, which was a massive scandal for the Spartan reputation at the time.
i don't think it would work on human vs human because the other one would go find a tool to work in their advantage. In this case, The Rock would get a gun and a car and then you're SOL.
I've read the anatomical feature that allows humans a wider range of comfortable speeds with one base gait is bipedalism, and four-legged gaits have narrower speed ranges.
This is easy to observe for dog lovers. Walk with a medium size (say 50-60 lbs) dog off leash and you'll notice the dog has to choose between a gait that's a little slow for a human walk or a gait that'd be a fast walk for a human -- but you can still match either of those without much trouble. If you choose not to match your walk to the dog's speed, the dog will alternate between the two gaits to roughly match your speed.
I find this a very interesting observation! (Don’t have a dog)
Note though, that the paper describes the different speeds that are possible when walking with equal efficiency to be quite narrow in comparison to running.
There is this related saying that „the fastest marathoners burn just as much calories as the slowest to complete 42km, they just do it in a much shorter time“. This kind of range is not available to walking.
Yes, a human walking faster to match the faster dog gait is much more tiring than walking at your own pace. And that slightly faster gait is still a relatively slow pace for a healthy dog, they're usually happy to go faster!
However, it's possible for a human to match speeds with the same base gait, whereas the dog gaits seem more limited to their narrow ideal speeds.
It shows that in contrast to most animals, the efficiency curve of humans for running speeds is extremely flat, ie, we are about equally efficient at many different speeds, while the kind of game that we hunted was not.
The discrepancy allowed us to find a speed where we could exhaust the animal after 10-30km (as I understand) provided we were also excellent trackers.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03052.epdf?sharing_tok...