The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing

Great book for endurance training, however, it falls short when it comes to dietary advice. For example, the following quote comes from the book:
"About 40 percent or more of the carbohydrates you eat is converted to fat and stored as body fat."

Excess Starch Does Not Turn to Body Fat

A widely held belief is that the sugars in starches are readily converted into fat and then stored unattractively in the abdomen, hips, and buttock. Incorrect! And there is no disagreement about the truth among scientists or their published scientific research. After eating, the complex carbohydrates found in starches, such as rice, are digested into simple sugars in the intestine and then absorbed into the bloodstream where they are transported to trillions of cells in the body in order to provide for energy. Carbohydrates (sugars) consumed in excess of the body’s daily needs can be stored (invisibly) as glycogen in the muscles and liver. The total storage capacity for glycogen is about two pounds. Carbohydrates consumed in excess of our need and beyond our limited storage capacity are not readily stored as body fat. Instead, these excess carbohydrate calories are burned off as heat (a process known as facultative dietary thermogenesis) or used in physical movements not associated with exercise.

The process of turning sugars into fats is known as de novo lipogenesis. Some animals, such as pigs and cows, can efficiently convert the low-energy, inexpensive carbohydrates found in grains and grasses into calorie-dense fats. This metabolic efficiency makes pigs and cows ideal “food animals.” Bees also perform de novo lipogenesis; converting honey (simple carbohydrates) into wax (fats). However, human beings are very inefficient at this process and as a result de novo lipogenesis does not occur under usual living conditions in people. When, during extreme conditions, de novo lipogenesis does occur the metabolic cost is about 30% of the calories consumed—a very wasteful process

Great book to help us maximize our training over the long term. Proven HR training technique to maximize training while lessening the risk of injury from going too hard too often. Can not go wrong by buying the book

An interesting read if you are looking for a more holistic, lifestyle approach to endurance training. It has a lot of tips on health, nutrition and general well being although I think it needs updating to fit modern lifestyles. I would have also have liked to see more information on training. Nevertheless, this is a book I would refer to again and again.

Thirty-three years running and always learning.... Dr Maffetone's "slow down to run faster" guidance is a revelation. It sounds stupid, doesn't it? How can running slower enable one to run (or bike/swim/hike, etc.) faster? Dr Maffetone explains how and why moving at one's maximum aerobic heart rate (180 minus current age) gradually increases the body's aerobic system ability to go faster at that max aerobic rate. This information applies to beginners, masters and elites. He covers nutrition and injuries, especially overtraining. (As I have learned over my years of running, symptoms of overtraining can be subtle and masked by stresses not related to exercise.) Do you want to perform and recover better in your endurance sport? I highly ecommend this book and its guidance.

This book makes complete sense from page one onwards. It may or may not help you win a professional marathon but will definitely help you stay extremely fit and injury free throughout your life and build phenomenal endurance.

This book is great for someone wanting to learn how to train for endurance running without being injured. This book is also great at helping to learn how to eat healthy and how your diet affects your physical fitness. It is difficult to read sometimes due to the length and the detail in the book, but it is full of useful information.

Dr. Maffetone is a pioneer and his methods work. His coaching helped Mark Allen win six Ironman World Championship titles in Hawaii. Dr. Maffetone's 180 Formula for determining maximum aerobic heart rate (MAHR), coupled with his maximum aerobic function (MAF) test are the foundation for an effective training and racing program. Since I started following his methods, my race times have dropped, injuries are very rare and my overall health has improved.

The information on 'carbohydrate intolerance' and Dr. Maffetone's Two-Week Test are priceless. I've completed the Two-Week Test and experienced the benefit of more even energy levels and reduced belly fat. Why do we eat so many refined carbohydrates and so much sugar anyway? Stop it for two weeks (based on the protocol outlined), see how you feel and how much weight you lose, and then decide how you want to eat. Dr. Maffetone also details how eating fewer refined carbs and less sugar will improve your training and racing. But don't take my word for it - the MAF test (running a set course at MAHR) will provide you with the results.

Results: at age 29 I qualified for the Ironman in Hawaii and completed the race in 10:37. Several years later I started using Dr. Maffetone's methods and competed in races up to ½ Ironman in length. (This book includes the information from two of Dr. Maffetone's earlier titles, Training for Endurance and Eating for Endurance.) At age 43 I qualified for Hawaii again and set a goal of beating my previous Hawaii time. I completed the race in 10:19. This would not have happened without Dr. Maffetone's methods.

I give this book to the triathletes I coach and it is the basis for our work together. The key is that athletes feel and see the results; this is motivating. "The Big Book" truly is THE book for faster race times, reduced body fat and better overall health.

The more I read books about training and exercise the more I think since there is no agreement amongst the medical and sports science professionals the thing for we amateurs to do is to find our own path - the one that agrees with our lifestyle, time commitment and leanings in health and nutrition. This book for me goes too deep into deep science when I really thought it was going to be a book about training.

I started training at my MAF and found that it is a comfortable pace for me - almost effortless - so I will continue to try it out for another month and if there are no results I'll change back to a more standard varied approach to training.

One other thing to be siad is that training should be fun and following the advice in this book does make training fairly boring. If you are an amateur who enjoys the training as much as doing events you might want to stick to what you are currently doing if you enjoy it. Variety in training (doing both speed and slow runs, rides, swims) keeps it fresh.

Most of this can be found in various locations on the web where excerpts have been reposted. In fact, I feel like I wasted money on the entire book. I didn't realized I'd already read the key points. If you want testimonials, fine. But I was looking for a little more substance. The title leads you to believe you'll get actual advice on training. This is, in my opinion, mostly theory. His other books might be more appropriate. There is a lot dedicated to his history as a runner, which quite frankly, I didn't really care about.

This book helped me win the Masters Division at the Race Across America in 2016 (a 3000 mile cycling race), put me into 7th Ironman (out of 2000) in the US in 2014 after 10 Ironmans in one year, 6/450 Americans at Paris-Brest-Paris (a 780 mile timed bike ride in France) in 2015, 1st overall at the 2017 Croom Zoom (a 100 kilometer ultrarunning race in Florida), etc - at age 53!
Its premise is simple: good nutrition, training mainly at your aerobic threshold, and active warm-up + warm-down (not stretching) will get you almost as fast as interval training and stretching, but without the overuse injuries, downtime, and loss of health. Fit and healthy is the name of the game.
Warning: the approach requires patience. It took me only a couple of months using interval training to train myself from a 9 minute mile to a 6:45 mile. A year later, it took 7 months of Maffetone to go from 9:10 down to 6:55 running mostly at the aerobic threshold. The difference: stress fracture with MRI diagnosis, achilles tendon heel injury requiring scraping (ouch!), hip injury the first time round; nada the second time around.
Of course, different training plans work differently for different people. This one certainly works well for me.

Having heard Phil Maffetone on trailrunnernation, buying the book was the only obvious immediate follow up I could make. And then following a plethora of advice the next many follow ups thereafter.

As he does so clearly not have any commercial interest in what sports product you buy, consume or wear, his advice is so much more believable.

The book itself is big. But it's worth reading every page and touches domains I would have not expected, like a detailed physiology of the foot. Which now seems obvious, since it is the one part or the human body that has to deal with all the impacts of running, cycling and even swimming (pushing off the wall...). So you better know all about it.

I still cannot believe I have not heard earlier about him, but am now sharing his thoughts and advice as much as I can - let alone follow it.

I want to highly recommend this book and its approach [and I have, in the past, to friends] but I would now hesitate after 1 year with Maffetone. Today, I find myself unsure of the principles and frustrated with the gaps left open within this book. Let me summarize what I have found that I believe is very worthwhile and/or appealing:

* The principle that fat utilization must be maximized for peak endurance performance

* Dietary principles of reducing excessive carbohydrate intake and eliminating allergenic foods (such as gluten) for optimal health

* The appeal of an relatively easy-intensity way to good health and peak performance

As one who'd tried higher intensity training efforts for amateur running and cycling, I found Maffetone's message very appealing. I especially gravitated to it after cutting the carbohydrate in my diet which limited my access to higher intensity training. I tried adhering to his heart-rate based formula to keep my training intensities within the prescribed training band and started, after 3 months, to see slivers of success in training. On the treadmill, over time, I eventually saw a 0.5 mph improvement in pace at the same heart rate. On the bicycle trainer, a 30 watt improvement at Maff heart rates. These changes were very gradual, however, as I train only 3-4 hours / week. In fact, for 3 months, I saw virtually NO improvement at all. Now, I was not a perfect adherent to the principle of NO anaerobic work; I did weight train, but only 2x a week and only for 30 minutes at a time (actual time in the act of weight lifting was likely only 15 min a week with rest-between-sets time factored out). Does this invalidate my results? I should hope that the human body is not so frail that a mere lifting of something heavy a couple of times, on off days, is enough to completely destroy aerobic adaptations. What a weak species we would be. Consider that I'm not training 10-15 hours a week as many, more dedicated runners might be doing. Either way, you should know from where I'm coming from. Maffetone does indicate that he considers any aerobic training in excess of his prescribed heart rate formula or weight training of ANY kind (regardless of the heart rate) to be `anaerobic' work that could interfere or destroy aerobic adaptations. Nevertheless, I do feel that my training schedule, overall, was light enough that I was exercising well within my recover abilities. Nevertheless, my results on his program were modest at best. I sleep well, eat fantastically healthy compared to the average Joe (frutis, vegetables, low carb diet, omega-3s daily, lean meats, healthy amounts of good fats --- you get the point). Even though I did see what could be regarded as "significant" improvement in a couple of markers, I found that very little of this translated during races. As such, let me summarize the issues I've come to see with the Maffetone method:

* The 180 formula does NOT take into account individual variations in heart rate stroke volume or muscle physiology for different sports. Maffetone does not consider maximum heart rate nor resting heart rate to be significant. Instead, his formulas are purely a function of age and a few modifiers that have nothing to do with your heart's individual characteristics. This seems to fly in the face of common sense and science. If you have a larger heart with a greater stroke volume, then you will be pumping more blood at 140 beats, doing more work and feeling a higher level of perceived exertion (and likely have a lower max heart rate) than someone with a smaller heart who, at 140 beats, might feel as though they are barely working. This is why most heart rate-based programs factor in maximum (and some resting heart rate) - the level of exertion for someone with a max hr at 170 will be different than someone with a max of 200. In addition, Maffetone does not consider "perceived exertion" which varies between sports at a given heart rate, to be significant: one Maff heart rate for all. Really? A swimmer should use the same heart rate as a runner though we know that the muscle composition of the upper body is likely very different than the legs (which are designed for long-range locomotion)? Isn't that why you would likely have a higher perceived exertion at a given heart rate in swimming or perhaps cycling than running - different muscle fiber composition? I should think so but Maff believes that the same metabolic demands are being made so the training effect is identical. I dare to say that this is likely to be proved wrong by science but I only dispute it today by my intuition that "perceived " exertion is a real phenomenon that is being ignored by Maffetone. He does not present a cogent explanation for ignoring it other than saying that weight bearing sports produce a higher perceived exertion. Weak. It certainly doesn't explain the difference between cycling and swimming which are both non-weight bearing but generate different perceived exertions. I strongly suspect that more sugar-burning aerobic fibers are involved in swimming given the use of upper body muscles and, hence, the higher perceived exertion than running (which uses muscles with a higher % of red muscle fibers) at a given heart rate but that's' for a physiologist to work out. I don't buy Maff's explanation at all, however.

* There is absolutely no guidance with regard to training volumes for different sports what-so-ever. Inexcusable. On the one hand, we're given, effectively, a simple one-size-fits-all 180 heart rate formula that does not take into account anything substantive in the way of individual cardiovascular physiology - yet we're told that training volumes are largely and individual matter. OK, fine, but can you give me a suggestion for the minimums here? A range? Can I improve at such low heart rates training 3x a week for 30 minutes a day? No guidance. Let me save you some suspense here - unlikely. For a book about `racing', there's an almost total lack of any sort of even semi-structured program regarding durations and frequency for ANY sport (save one small and not very useful example of a triathlete schedule)- just a lot of sidebar anecdotes of people training for unspecified periods of time and having "success" or reducing volumes, when specified, from 18 to 12 hours a week (volumes far in excess of many amateurs I know). While it might vary from individual to individual and given your goals, I think we can all agree that training 1x/week for 1 minute will get you nowhere. So there, that's a lower boundary we can all agree on. Extreme case? Yes - but the point is one can and ought to give a lower limit from which to start a training program to see progress and then principles upon which to evaluate whether volume should increase or decrease.

* Heart rate variations are not thoroughly discussed. There seems to be this implicit and rather impractical notion that you can train up to the maximum prescribed heart rate and just hold it there - as if it is some number that can be reached and held. If my maximum "aerobic" heart rate, as prescribed by the 180 formula, is 140, I can guarantee you it will drift to 141, 142, even 144 and then back to 140, 139, 138 within any given 2 minute period of time - I know, I've seen it happen all the time. At such low heart rates, my body is so relaxed that if I so much as *think* about something a little exciting, my heart rate will spike. How much variation around my max Maff heart rate should be tolerated? We're told, none. So, given the natural variation in heart rate that occurs in training (i.e. I see +/- 3 beats, routinely), best to play it safe and shoot for Maff -3 so as not to exceed it for even a brief period. All in all, at such low heart rates, it is subject to considerable "noise" from your state-of-mind, thoughts, ambient temperatures, etc.

* Mis-use of the term "aerobic". Maffetone clearly defines what he means by "aerobic" early on to refer to that which uses predominately fat for fuel while fully acknowledging that, technically, sugar is burned aerobically as well. Nevertheless, anything that uses sugar, predominately, for fuel, is deemed anaerobic for purposes of discussion in the book. Fine. However, later in the book, he seeks to emphasize the value of his training principles by pointing out that the aerobic system provides 99% of the energy for long distance aerobic events. OK, wait a minute. Now, yes, that's true, but that involves both the sugar and fat burning systems (and sugar burning would actually account for a larger portion of that 99% than fat at higher intensity aerobic events) but he "implies" that it's the fat burning system providing that 99%. Let's keep the discussion about "aerobic" system straight here and acknowledge that the sugar-burning component IS a critical system for racing success as well.

* Results. Bottom line, if you train for modest volumes (read: 5 hours / week or fewer), I think your success will be modest at best. I conducted 95% of my aerobic training with Maffetone principles and, while I've seen some improvement, it was absolutely dwarfed, in comparison, by my prior success with programs such as Smart Coach provided by Runner's world wherein, training at more moderate intensities for most of my longer runs and doing just one speed workout a week resulted in a 9 minute improvement in my half marathon time in just 3.5 months of training (40s/mile improvement in pace). My average training week was only 18 miles/week (3 hours/week) when using the program prescribed by Smart Coach [and I weight trained....]. Compare that to training for 4-5 hours / week using Maff and I've seen - I don't know,....maybe 1-2 minutes of improvement for a half marathon- if you squint. In fact, Chris Carmichael has pointed out in his book "The Time-Crunched Cyclist" that, if you have less than 8 hours / week to train, traditional, lower-intensity programs just don't work for such folks. That's the only guidance I have right now and I would pass that on to those considering the Maff approach.

So, while I think there is some value here, I think a follow-on book with much more specific guidance is needed. Realistic training expectations need to be established based on possible training volumes. Actual training programs should be indicated with clear discussions of "frequency" and "duration" for running, cycling, swimming and triathlons. Different distances could be discussed as well. Given the size of this book, the actual intellectual content could have been condensed to 1/3 the size. That leaves 2/3rd of relative fluff that could have been used to address the aforementioned gaps in concrete training advice and coaching.

There is a feeling one gets when reading something that is "spot on" when one has practical knowledge of things. When I begun reading Maffetone's work I never felt different. It all simply made sense to me as if I had known it all along. When it comes to diet and nutrition I'm proud to say that his conclusions and advice were not different from what I have come to believe over the years based on my own experience, research and observation as someone who simply wants to stay away from the doctor. Maffetone though, provides invaluable advice that I have found incredibly useful.

If I had to tell something that makes this book stand from the rest is that it talks about fitness as something different from health and gives practical advice about every single aspect of endurance, from training to nutrition.

Everyone interested in endurance should read this book. I'm proud to say I keep my copy as reference, always at hand.

This book is full of VERY sound advice on exercise and nutrition but short on details needed to implement his training and nutrition ideas. There is no serious differentiation in the advice for beginners, novices, competitors or elite athletes and no plans or charts that help you create your own plan based on where you are. Rambling. You can get the same info in free articles and sometimes more details from other writers. VERY sound advice, though.

Fantastic. I've increased speed at MAF heartrate (138) by 23% in 2.5 months, lost 17 lbs, and had no appetite spikes. Let that soak in. If you want a more condensed explanation of his plan, check out his other book, The 1:59 Marathon, or Primal Endurance

This book is a fascinating look into the framework and the reasoning behind a comprehensive training system. I use Mark Allens Training Programs and Phil Maffetone was his coach and now I understand completely the reason behind Marks Training. Phil not only covers the mechanical aspect of training but provides a "holistic" appraisal of all the ingredients that go into successful training and racing. I enjoyed reading the manual and have taken alot from it and I hope I will train with Mark Allens Programs with a better understanding of all the pieces of the jigsaw.

Junk! "Dr" Maffetone goes to great links not to tell you that he's neither a medical doctor nor PhD. I didn't know so I bought the book. A waste of $13! If you're in to all of the very NON-SCIENTIFIC "dried milk weed will make you run fast" nutrition nonsense, then this book's for you. But if you're looking for real science, find a book by a serious coach with a real pedigree or a research scientist.

The author does get a little technical from time to time but the information is worth wading through. This book explains how the cardio/aerobic system actually functions and how to use it to become a faster healthier runner. Read it and you will be enlightened.

Excellent and well organized factual information on almost every subject for the serious bike rider and/or endurance athlete. Many new and, at times, surprising detailed discussions on almost every topic from heart monitors to nutrition to foot problems... Good table of contents, and the book is well supported by the author who actively responds to email questions from readers. The downside of the book is that the more you read of it the more you want to know about the subjects covered. Well worth the price.

Athletes of all levels will find "The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing" to be a necessary addition to their library. The book proves to be educational, optimistic and entertaining, all at the same time. Dr. Phil Maffetone has already proved himself in the world of triathlon and endurance sports and can now add successful writer to his lists of accomplishments.