About a year ago I came across a post on twitter, “I’m tired of hearing about minimum effective dose, I want to hear more about maximum effective dose.” And reading the replies, there was a lot of shared sentiment. For a while Twitter was awash of posts expounding on minimum effective dose; you couldn’t escape it if you were following coaches in the track & field or strength & conditioning worlds. But I was surprised how many people took minimum effective dose to effectively mean: How can I do as little as possible?

Minimum Effective Dose Defined

But what if instead you took just 1 pill and found that your headache didn’t go away? Now we’ve taken away the effective dose because we tried a minimum that didn’t do the trick. In this case, we know that not only was 2 pills an effective dose, we also know that it was the minimum effective dose. It was necessary to take 2 in order to treat the problem.

What About Maximum Effective Dose?

That doesn’t mean maximum effective dose isn’t necessarily important. Knowing what your athletes can handle set’s the ceiling so you know what you need to avoid. If I have an athlete that routinely gets injured above 55 miles a week then, at least for now, I need to consider that their maximum effective dose so we don’t cross above that. It doesn’t mean we should actually be running 55 miles a week though, because any additional stress is going to tip them over the edge and still hard their development. That athlete may find more success being closer to 45-50 a week and only moving up when we feel we’ve developed them enough that they could actually withstand 60-65 a week if needed.

A Practical Example

One of our milers we increase their mileage from 30mpw to 40mpw. Over the course of the season his times steadily drop and eventually runs his 4:30.

The other increases his mileage from 30mpw all the way up to 60mpw. Over that same timeframe he also drops his time down to 4:30, just as his brother did. 

For all intents and purposes these are the same athlete playing out two scenarios. Neither got injured in the process, but the athlete running 60mpw achieved the exact same results despite running 50% more than his twin. Both had training that was “effective” but one had to do an enormous amount more work to get there. 

Now you might be thinking, that isn’t realistic, the guy running 60mpw would be much faster as long as he wasn’t getting injured. I’m not sure I agree. Overtraining is a very real thing. Every athlete has a point where the training load they are using is so great that their bodies can’t adapt to it. It isn’t breaking them per se, but every training session becomes a fight or flight response that it’s just trying to survive, not necessarily adapt to. This can come from not recovering enough, going too deep in the well every workout, being stressed out, not eating or sleeping enough, it doesn’t really matter the cause, but every coach has encountered athletes that are training harder than before but not improving as a result. 

Finding an Effective Range  

Most coaches should plan to have their athletes operate somewhere between their minimum effective dose and maximum effective dose, but ultimately still aim to be closer to the minimum than the maximum. The only reason it may not be practical to operate exactly on the minimum effective dose is just that misjudging the minimum on the wrong side means that you will also lose the effective part. Operating just above (but not too far above) can usually keep you far enough from riskier training that might lead to injury, but still ensuring that most of your training sessions are going to cause the adaptation that we’re looking for. 

Takeaways