Onus Athletics

Where did the interval session come from, and what does it actually do? In this episode of the Onus Athletics podcast, Connor follows it back more than a hundred years, to sprinters at the end of the 1800s, through a boxing manual, a Finnish handbook for training horses, a German coach and his star runner, and two labs, one in Freiburg and one in Stockholm, to what the science now says about the three things you can change in a session: the recovery, the length of the rep, and how fast you run it.

It’s also the story of the rest between the reps. At first nobody planned it, then coaches timed it, then they controlled it by the pulse, and in 1959 two doctors in Freiburg argued that the rest was where the training actually happened.

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