What does consistency in training look like? It depends on who you ask. For example, one coach might tell their athletes to run on the track several times a week, while another coach might plan intervals after a race.
Both coaches believe they’re acting in the best interest of their athletes, but the ‘via negativa’ coaching approach argues that the latter approach doesn’t reflect consistency.
The ‘via negativa’ approach is one way a coach can prioritize consistent training by avoiding burnout and injury.
What Does Via Negativa Mean?
Also referred to as the apophatic way, the idea of ‘via negativa’ originated in theology to define God by focusing on what God is not.
In other words, via negative is defining something – often a system – by focusing on what it isn’t. In endurance sports, the system we’re considering is the athlete or group of athletes.
The concept of ‘via negativa’ is designing a system around what you don’t want it to do.
For an athlete, coaches want to avoid burnout, injury, and sickness. By avoiding these things, the athlete remains consistent and therefore has the opportunity to get better. The aim is to eliminate any points of failure.
Pros and Cons of ‘Via Negativa’ Coaching
Pro: Avoids Overconfidence
By inviting one to address what they don’t know, ‘via negativa’ advocates for humility. Endurance coaches often come across situations with extremely high uncertainty. For example, a simple training session might result in a positive outcome (increase an athlete’s fitness) or a negative outcome (cause an athlete injury, lead to illness, or end in burnout).
Acknowledging that you cannot predict the outcomes of a session with complete certainty allows you to stay mindful of potential risks.
Pro: Focuses on the Essentials
In endurance sports, consistency is key. There isn’t a world-class endurance athlete who isn’t ruthlessly consistent.
For an athlete, consistency comes down to training, sleep, strength, life stress, and more. Coaches and athletes need to look into these sub-components and identify weak points. This helps to avoid periods of inconsistency.
Con: Possible Risk Aversion
One argument against ‘via negativa’ coaching is risk aversion. When preparing for a goal event, an athlete’s training volume and intensity enhance fitness. However, increasing volume and intensity could also increase injury risk.
Being overly risk-averse leads to the possibility that an athlete misses out on potential fitness gains to avoid injury.
Consistency Over Volume
The via-negative coaching approach prioritizes long-term development. For example, fifty miles of consistent running each week is more effective than 65 miles per week with one-third of the year injured.
Many running coaches are familiar with this scenario. It’s not uncommon for an athlete to train 20 hours or 100 miles a week for short or medium durations leading up to key races. However, these athletes often average significantly less over the course of an entire year.
Training volume has a time component that’s frequently overlooked. Endurance adaptations take time – typically weeks, months, or even years. Coaches can benefit from expanding their timescales.
Getting Athlete Buy-In
Prioritizing long-term adaptations means focusing on progress year over year instead of from session to session or week to week.
This makes athlete buy-in crucial, requiring patience from all parties.
Running is a primary example, as reducing intensity or weekly volume can increase long-term volume and intensity accumulation.
Examples of Via Negativa Application
If external events frequently disrupt your athlete’s consistency, consider removing the following items from their programming. This isn’t to say you should never do these things, but eliminating them can reduce the fragility of your athlete.
Reduce Fasted Training
Short-term carbohydrate restriction can impair bone formation. Additionally, carbohydrate-restricted training (like the low-carb, high-fat diet) might not offer enough benefits to justify the potential risk they pose to athletes.
For example, studies show that carbohydrate availability affects hormones in female athletes. This includes:
- luteinizing hormone, which helps control the menstrual cycle,
- T3, which plays a crucial role in controlling metabolism, and
- leptin, which regulates the long-term balance between food intake and energy expenditure.
These hormones are associated with the female athlete triad, a subset of relative energy deficiency (RED-S).
Reduce Volume, Intensity, or Both
Energy availability is a key determinant in the likelihood of an athlete developing symptoms of overtraining syndrome.
While training, energy expenditure is driven by volume and intensity. Simply put, you burn more calories by going harder or going longer.
A simple fix to overtraining is to reduce training energy expenditure. Remember, your athlete needs enough energy to train, recover, and adapt.
Limit Late Nights and Early Mornings
Sleep is essentially a legal performance enhancer, and thousands of studies back this claim.
For example, a study published in the Current Sports Medicine Reports showed that consistently sleeping less than seven hours per night for 14 days increases the risk of injury by 70% compared to those who sleep more than seven hours.
Prioritizing sleep – even at the expense of some training – can reduce the chances of your athlete getting injured.
Case Study: Improving a Triathlete’s Run
Below is an example of a triathlete whose running is an identified area of weakness.
Initial Challenge
In 2022, they ran a 5k PB of 15:51 with an average run volume of 2 hours and 4 minutes per week (around 25km – or 14 miles – per week).
Both the coach and the athlete agreed to increase training volume. As shown in the graph below, the athlete struggled to stay healthy.
Throughout 2022 and 2023, the athlete had several periods of disruption due to injury. While a light increase in long-term training load was achieved, it wasn’t significant.
Applying the Via Negativa Approach
In the winter of 2023, one hard session was removed from the athlete’s training program and a longer run containing ‘steady’ work (around LT1) was added.
So far, the athlete has managed a sustainable increase in average run volume to about 2 hours and 44 minutes per week (around 33-35km – or 21-23 miles – per week). This increase (about 22% annually since 2022) aided the athlete’s running performance.
In a recent 70.3, the athlete improved their run by about 4 minutes, a big improvement for an athlete of this level. (They’ve yet to do another open 5k.)
The athlete was also struggling with bone stress and soft tissue injuries during training. To combat these, we reduced high-velocity run workouts in favor of threshold running.
We also focused on fuelling long and hard runs with 90g of carbohydrates per hour, as glycogen availability is correlated with bone health.
Finally, we scheduled downtime, with an occasional full week or half-week off from running. We replaced these sessions with elliptical training to allow the bone to repair itself before we reached tissue failure.
While these changes reduced short-term fitness, the athlete accumulated more load in the long run.
In Conclusion
Beyond athlete buy-in and coaching patience, the cornerstone of ‘via negativa’ coaching is to remove the aspects of an athlete’s training and life that cause inconsistency.
As a coach, you must think years into the future, moving away from the short-term ‘race to race’ mentality that often leads to injury. Done correctly, this approach fosters long-term success.
References:
Charest, J., et al. (2023, February 25). Sleep and Athletic Performance: Impacts on Physical Performance, Mental Performance, Injury Risk and Recovery, and Mental Health. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9960533/
Fensham, N., et al. (2022, July 23). Short-Term Carbohydrate Restriction Impairs Bone Formation at Rest and During Prolonged Exercise to a Greater Degree than Low Energy Availability. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jbmr.4658
Lodge, M., et al. (2023, October 13). Considerations of Low Carbohydrate Availability (LCA) to Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) in Female Endurance Athletes: A Narrative Review. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10609849/
Waschenfelder, T. (2023, July 9). Via Negativa: Improvement By Subtraction. Retrieved from https://www.wealest.com/articles/via-negativa
