Sierra Ledge Rat wrote:As someone who used to run ultra-marathons in the mountains, I call say definitively that endurance training does more than develop cardiovascular fitness. Endurance training also strengthens connective tissues such as bones, ligaments and tendons.
Six minutes of intense workout simply does not strengthen connective tissues like endurance training does.
Do you have any comparative studies that you can reference? Or have you ever done a comparison by doing only high intensity workouts for a period of time? High intensity raises human growth hormone levels (especially for us older people) which would enable more rapid repair of large and small connective tissue injuries. Endurance training can easily weaken connective tissue: stress fractures, tendonitis, sprained ligaments, synovitis etc.
I'm not convinced that high intensity workouts alone are as good as traditional lower intensity workouts with or without traditional (less than 100%) intervals, but as far as I can tell there have been very few comparative studies and none for a long duration. I'd be surprised if anyone has ever tried training for endurance events using only high intensity because it would be well outside the traditional norm. (Of course it used to be that long static stretching was the only accepted way to stretch and dynamic and ballistic stretching were considered dangerous. Now dynamic, short duration static, and even ballistic stretching are state-of-the-art.)