Capacity vs Utilization Training: A Deep Dive

Note: These Deep Dive articles are long on theory and are intended for those seeking a deeper understanding of the art and science of training. 

A vast body of knowledge covering the full spectrum of endurance sports exists. I have culled and distilled a good deal of that knowledge, making it more accessible and applicable to mountain athletes.  One of these principles that I’ve embraced is that of Capacity and Utilization Training. 

Bob Bowman, famous as the coach of Michael Phelps (18 Olympic gold medals) for 15 years, coined these terms to describe two different methods of training swimmers.  I heard his explanation at a coaching conference around 2012. US swimming has had unparalleled international successes, so it made sense to pay close attention to see how this model could be adapted to other endurance sports.

Here is how Bowman defines these terms:

• Capacity Training is training that improves the long-term performance potential of the athlete, potentially at the expense of near term performance.
• Utilization Training is training that improves the near-term performance results of the athlete, potentially at the expense of long term performance potential.

Note: When I wrote chapter two of Training for the New Alpinism, I had not fully absorbed the importance of Bowman’s categorization. In that chapter, I used the terms Base (or General) Training and Specific Training I was more familiar with and which had been in use for decades.  While it is only terminology, I have since come to see these newer names as more descriptive and helpful in explaining general training theory, so when I wrote the same chapters in Training for the Uphill Athlete, I used Capacity and Utilization.  I hope the reader will agree with my choice.

To clarify further, Capacity Training is training that increases the athlete’s capacity for work in all the fundamental qualities needed for the goal event, even though much of that training may not look like the event itself.   This is the unglamorous, often tedious, training that will make up most of an endurance athlete’s training volume.

On the other hand, utilization is training that fully utilizes whatever work capacities the athlete currently has in workouts that closely mimic the demands of the event.  These Utilization workouts, like the event itself, bring together most if not all of the fundamental capacities into one workout.  Utilization Training is the stuff that looks like your sport, makes great Youtube and “feels like training.”  These are the exact reasons Utilization training gets over-emphasized in many training programs.

Both these methods play critical roles in the proper preparation of an athlete.  The trick is finding the proper balance for you and your event.  The most common error I see is athletes doing almost exclusively Utilization training.  This mistake occurs when the athlete (or coach) takes the Principle of Specificity to its ultimate expression.

Lessons from Other Sports

Through trial and error over many decades, traditional endurance sports have experimented with the balance of Capacity and Utilization Training. Distance running has had this debate several times in the past 75 years. Most recently, the disappointing US results in the ’90s and early 2000s, compared to the 70s and 80s, coincided with a shift from a Capacity-oriented training system to one relying heavily on a Utilization approach.

Rowing also had this debate back in the ’80s after a dramatic change in the coaching philosophy in Germany, where the abandonment of the utilization approach in favor of one based on building capacity led to their domination of the sport.

Cross-country skiing had a similar discussion in the early 2000s when physiologist Dr. Jan Helgarud controversially proclaimed that much of the Capacity Training that had historically been the mainstay of cross-country ski training was a waste of time.  The stopwatch quickly disproved this idea in the ultimate crucible, the competition arena.

Around that same time, swimming underwent a training revolution, led by Jan Olbrecht’s book The Science of Winning (highly recommended for those who want to delve deeper into this material). Bowman, a self-proclaimed disciple of Olbrecht, had his eyes opened to the distinction between what Olbrecht terms Capacity and Power (Utilization) Training. Bowman’s success in training Phelps while relying predominantly on Capacity has profoundly impacted the direction of US swimming training philosophy.

The stopwatch doesn’t lie. Using competing training philosophies, the best endurance athletes have lined up at the starting lines of innumerable competitions. The results clearly show that those who prepare by focusing on building the fundamental capacities needed in their sport before adding in Utilization Training have better results in the long run. Those who skip over the Capacity Training and jump right to the Utilization work typically see rapid improvement followed by an eventual plateau in performance. When this happens, piling on more Utilization training won’t fix the problem.  In almost all of these cases that stagnation in performance is caused by one or more of the fundamental capacities being underdeveloped.

Capacity Training

Capacity Training almost always results in a short-term decrease in performance.  This is because you increase your work capacity by fatiguing yourself and doing so regularly. So, you’ll usually carry at least some fatigue during a capacity-building period. That necessary fatigue will probably result in decreased performance.  You’re not likely to see PRs when in a prolonged Capacity build-up. This is the trade-off if you are looking for long-term performance gains. Building capacity is like putting money in the bank. Having a big bank account in and of itself doesn’t do you much good until you need to start spending. Utilization Training (and goal events) is where you spend those savings.  The bigger the capacity bank account, the wilder your spending spree before the bank starts sending you overdraft notices.

Initially, that Capacity bank account can take years to top up. But once built up, it can be maintained with less effort than it took to build it in the first place. It’s analogous to building the Interstate Highway System: Tedious and dull during the construction process but once completed, it allows much more traffic to flow and flow faster (more work can be done more quickly).

Covering Your Bases

If you can increase your capacities in the following areas you will be well on your way to a more successful mountain experience.

Without a doubt, the essential fundamental quality that every mountain athlete needs most is Aerobic Capacity.  This is the capacity to do work with the least involvement of the anaerobic (or glycolytic) metabolic system. Famed Soviet coach Yuri Verkhoshansky called the training to increase aerobic capacity anti-glycolytic training.  There are several ways to measure one’s aerobic capacity.  I cover most of those in other articles.  You can think of this as the amount of power you can generate or the speed you can run or hike at your aerobic threshold.   For ease of tracking, I recommend using a heart rate proxy measure of your aerobic threshold.

The next most crucial fundamental quality to build capacity is muscular endurance. I won’t go into detail here because I’ve written thousands of words on this subject, and we have those articles available on the site. A quick definition of muscular endurance (ME) is the ability to produce a high percentage of a muscle’s maximum force for a prolonged period.  The definition is intentionally vague. The gist is that the longer the duration of that period, the lower the percent of the maximal force.  Different length events have different muscular endurance requirements. Redpointing a new project may require ME of a duration of less than a minute if the crux is short or many minutes if the route is sustained.   The ME required for climbing Denali is of a much lower intensity that lasts for hours on end.

Another one of these areas where a certain amount of capacity is needed is strength and power.  I’ve lumped these two together because power depends on strength, so they are closely linked yet trained differently.  By strength, I am not talking about “gym” strong.  A weight training gym is a great place to get strong,  but for many, the gym becomes the goal itself that they are training for, rather than using it as just one tool in the toolbox to improve mountain performance which should be the goal.  If you look at successful athletes across the full spectrum of endurance sports,  you notice typical body morphology.  These athletes are generally lean and relatively lightly muscled.  Why’s that?

You do not need to be very strong to do well in the mountains.  You certainly don’t need to be able to deadlift twice your body weight or bench press your body weight.  And you certainly do not need or even want to be heavily muscled.  Those bulging biceps and terrific trapeziuses have to be oxygenated too when you’re going uphill.  They’re using oxygen that could be used by your legs to propel you.

Special strength considerations are needed for petite women who often carry the same pack weight as their usually larger male climbing partners.  I talk about strength in general and those special considerations in Chapter five of Training for the New Alpinism.

Utilization Training 

Utilization Training will maximally utilize an athlete’s capacities at that time, making maximum use of the body’s infrastructure. Extending the Interstate Highway analogy: It dumps a lot of fast-moving traffic onto the existing highway system. If the roads can handle the traffic, a lot of work can be done. But if a section of the road is still under construction, that bottleneck will be the limiter.

Fun facts about Utilization Training:

• It gives rapid gains that are short-lived.
• It should always closely mimic most of the demands of the goal event.
• It should be of the same intensity as the event being trained for.
• It won’t contribute much to performance if the athlete’s capacities are low.
• It is most effective with athletes who have a large capacity.
• High-intensity Utilization Training reduces the athlete’s aerobic capacity, which must be offset with Aerobic Capacity Training during some parts (s) of the training cycle.  If you wish to progress long-term, though, after a prolonged period of Utilization such as a racing season, you’ll need to return to a Capacity-building period in which you analyze your relative strengths and weaknesses. How long? Like most everything else, it depends. It depends upon how much capacity you have built up.
• High-level athletes can and must do much more Utilization Training because they already have very high capacities in the fundamental qualities required for their sport.
• Regardless of the athlete’s aerobic capacity, as the primary goal event approaches (a minimum of 6-8 weeks before tapering), some Utilization training must be added to the training plan for best results.
• Aerobic Utilization Training increases the fraction and duration of the maximum aerobic power that the athlete can sustain. Often called Threshold training, Aerobic Power training and maxVO2 training.
• Anaerobic Utilization Training increases the fraction of the anaerobic capacity used at near maximal intensity. This is called anaerobic endurance and, as mentioned above, plays almost no role in events lasting more than a few minutes.
• Intelligent athletes understand the bank account analogy mentioned earlier. Too much utilization training at a higher intensity or longer duration above your current work capacity is psychologically challenging. You risk overdrawing your bank account and becoming overtrained or injured.
• Athletes with a big bank account balance (High Capacity) can go on wild spending sprees (Utilization) and still not get overdraft notices.

Training Fundamental Qualities for Targeted Capacity Training

We’ve identified the principal qualities that will prepare you well for mountain sports.  Especially early in your training life, capacity-building training sessions should target primarily just one of these qualities: a Zone 1-2 run or for a climber doing an ARCing session in the climbing gym. That will ensure that the maximum capacity gains are made in each quality.  As you mature athletically and later in your training cycle, combining a couple of these qualities into the same workout can be helpful.  Say, adding pick-ups (strides) to your Zone 1-2 run.  Or for a climber doing a hard bouldering session before ARCing.

Aerobic Capacity is trained with continuous movement exercises such as running and hiking at an intensity under one’s aerobic threshold.  At a cellular level, this encourages many adaptations that improve the muscle’s ability to produce more forceful contractions for longer durations by utilizing oxidative metabolism and fat as the primary fuel.

Anaerobic Capacity is the ability to perform intense exercise for between 30 seconds and 2 minutes.  This quality is of minimal interest to mountaineers and mountain runners whose events last many hours.  It can play an essential part in training rock and ice and mixed climbers, skimo racers and VK runners.  It is trained using repeated short bouts of exhaustive exercise in a sport-specific mode.  This quality plays next to no role in the performance of any mountain athlete besides those engaging in hard rock, ice or mixed climbing.

Strength Capacity is the ability to develop high forces in the working muscles. It can take the form of very general exercises used to condition the less athletically mature and improve the resistance to injury of all athletes. Examples would be deadlift or squat, pull-ups, and push-ups. It can also be used in more specific movements with high resistance.  Examples include box step-ups with a heavy pack or barbell for the mountaineer.  Bulgarian Split Squats for the mountain runner. Weighted pull-ups, hangboard for rock climbers. Ice axe hangs for ice and mixed climbers.

Power Capacity layers on top of strength because, ultimately, every athlete will perform better if they can generate high forces faster.  Power training is done with relatively low resistance and high speed of movement.  Hill Sprints are a good example that can be used for a wide variety of mountain athletes.  A campus board is power training for rock or ice and mixed climbing.

Technical Skills will improve your movement economy.   Mastering the technical requirements of your sport will mean less energy needed to climb harder, run faster, move quicker over rough alpine terrain or skin uphill easier.  This skill development can only be mastered through thousands of repetitions done perfectly. If you practice these skills poorly, all that happens is that you get really good doing them wrong.  Seek guidance from a good coach. It will be a big time saver.  These can only be learned by doing the skill in the environment you will be using it.  If you walk only on smooth flat surfaces, you can’t expect to gain the balance and coordination needed to feel comfortable in rough alpine terrain.

Bringing Together the Fundamental Qualities in Utilization Workouts

In these training sessions, you will begin to model the demands of the event in very specific ways. These sessions will usually combine several of the above-mentioned fundamental qualities.

Examples of this would be:

• Heavily weighted, steep uphill hikes for the mountaineer rely on the aerobic, strength and muscular endurance capacities you have built. If any one of these is underdeveloped, it will limit maximal utilization.
• High-intensity uphill interval sessions for the mountain runner, ski mountaineer and skimo racer bring together the same qualities the mountaineer above needed, but in a more sport-specific way.
• Long demanding bouldering or lead climbing sessions for the rock or ice and mixed climber similarly bring together the aerobic capacity built during ARCing sessions with the strength and power developed in the hard bouldering sessions, hangboard and even the general strength of pull-ups.
• Effective Utilization work can be done in low-priority races and on shorter and easier climbs than the goal climb.

Conclusion

Capacity Training and Utilization Training each have their place in an effective training program.  Capacity Training takes the vast majority of an athlete’s training time. Only when the Capacity Training is prioritized, when the bank account has as big a balance as time and training history allows, do you begin to make withdrawals in the form of Utilization Training. The results of the Utilization Training, which can be astonishingly quick (a few weeks) and seductively satisfying, depend wholly on the amount of Capacity Training done beforehand. For that reason, all athletes wanting to improve their performance should….

Take the long view. Real capacity is built from year to year, not weekly or monthly.