Train like Mo Farah?

Mo Farah is the most successful male track distance runner in the history of the sport, and he is the most successful British track athlete in modern Olympic Games history. So training like Mo is bound to be beneficial, right?

Well, yes and no. Undoubtedly, there are some underpinning training princiiples that enabled Mo to be a successful athlete, and following them will produce results. There's also the fact that every athlete has different strengths and weaknesses that need to be addressed to become the best they can be, whether that's from their genetics, or from their upbringing and most importantly their previous training : "nature and nurture".

Here's a list of some of Mo Farah's achievements:

As you can see, Mo was a very successful athlete prior to the London Olympic Games, but until 2011 his success was limited to the 'European stage'. So what changed in 2011?

In February 2011 Mo changed his coach to Alberto Salazar in the US, only 18 months before the "Home Olympics". So what did they do differently to cause Mo to gain such success?

The story goes that when Alberto first met Mo he asked him what type of training he was doing. "Just running" was Mo's reply. So Alberto introduced some new elements to his training, including lifting weights, but more interestingly (to me, anyway) was that he got Mo throwing the Javelin.

Why on earth get an elite endurance runner to throw the Javelin? Well there's a couple of things to note about all throwing events.

Despite what many people think, long throws rely on the legs and the core more than the arms. All throws require a strong rotation of the hips and the torso so to accelerate the arm and the object to be thrown.This requires a really strong core.

Throwing the Javelin also requires the ability to accelerate and decelerate quickly to launch the javelin. This again builds strong legs and hips in particular. Mo didn't win any of his medals by setting off with five laps to go. He invariably won them in the last 600m, by running really fast. That required strength which he had gained from the javelin throwing in addition to the 10-15 miles a day he ran.

So this all begs the question : should you take up the Javelin?

The answer is : Probably not.

Why - well Alberto Salazar obviously noted a constraint in Mo's physical capability that Javelin throwing could help rectify. So he used it.

But your constraints (and there's always one) may not require javelin throwing but plyometrics or strength training or speed work or longer runs or core exercises. You may have an inkling of what it is, but it's always worth talking to one of the Club coaches to see what they think.

Lastly, although we are all unique, we do have much in common, so for a bit of fun I have compared the physiology of Mo Farah with one of our Club members, who wishes to be anonymous, so we'll call him Mo' Cheesecake.

The two Mo's : Left Farah; Right Cheesecake

The human body broadly comprises three things : skeleton, muscles and fat, and a lot of water, about 60%.

For a man the skeleton weighs about 10kg (unless you are carrying some extra weight due to heavy bones!). It does scale roughly with height.

The average adult male has 18 to 24% of total body mass as fat mass, the average female being 25 to 31%.

NB Athlete's percentages can be much lower : 6 to 13% for men and 14 to 20% for women.

Muscle mass varies between 18 to 24%.

Mo Farah is 5ft 9ins (1.75m) and weighed 58kg. Mo Cheesecake is 5ft 7ins (1.7m) and weighs 68kg. So Farah has a BMI of 19 and Cheescake has 24. Here's the physiology (approximately) of the two Mo's:

* Assuming Mo’s at the bottom end of the Athlete’s range, i.e. 6%.

Cheesecake’s value comes from his smart bathroom scales (23%).

So although Cheesecake is only 17% more in weight than Farah, he looks a lot bigger, and this is due to the fact that fat is less dense than muscle by about 15%.

Farah’s combined fat and muscle occupies 45.3 litres, whereas Cheesecake’s 56.4 litres, which is 25% more, and explains why Farah looks like a Gazelle and Cheesecake a “Brick S***house”.

Mo, one of your plates is missing, and don't ask what the guy behind is doing!

Interestingly, Cheesecake lifts heavier weights than Farah but actually has less muscle, which shows that you can gain muscle with other strategies to lifting weights. It might have something to do with the speed Mo runs at!

Some research I found recently also shows that lifting heavy weights slowly actually stimulates growth of slow twitch muscle fibres, not fast. So endurance runners should get more benefit for their running lifting weights than sprinters. That’s why sprinters do much lifting lower weights as fast as possible, and also do plyometrics, so to stimulate the development of fast twitch fibres and indeed the activity of the Central Nervous System.

I hope you found this interesting. In the summer, i will post some more articles to hopefully help you improve your training so that you get the running performances you deserve and are capable of.

Dorian