The Norwegian Singles method, and the case for boring training
No hard sessions, no peak weeks, the same workouts every week. It looks too simple to work. Here's why it does, and where it falls short.
Show a runner a Norwegian Singles training week for the first time and the reaction is nearly always the same. Where’s the hard session?
There isn’t one. That’s rather the point.
Two sessions a day, minus one
The Norwegian method has a slight image problem. Mention it and people picture Jakob Ingebrigtsen on a track in Sadnes, pricking his fingertip between reps to check his lactate, two threshold sessions in a single day. All of it is real and all of it works. None of it describes the life of someone with a job, a commute, etc.
Norwegian Singles is what happens when you keep the principle and lose the logistics. It was pieced together by an amateur runner who posted his training on LetsRun under the name Sirpoc. He trained once a day. It worked remarkably well and plenty of other people with day jobs started copying him. Credit where it’s due: it’s one of the more useful things to come out of an internet forum.
What it actually is
The engine of the method is sub-threshold running. Threshold is roughly the fastest pace you can hold for about an hour before lactate starts piling up faster than your body can clear it. Sub-threshold sits just below that, somewhere around 5 to 10 seconds per kilometre slower than your threshold pace. It should feel controlled. Strong, but controlled.
You run it as intervals: 1km, 2km or 3km reps with short recoveries of around a minute. The short rest matters. It’s long enough to give you a breather and short enough to keep your body working in that zone where it’s both producing and clearing lactate. That’s the adaptation you’re after.
Two or three of those sessions a week. Everything else genuinely easy. The quality work adds up to roughly a fifth to a quarter of your weekly volume. It grows slowly. Here’s what twelve weeks of progression can look like:
| Week 1 | Week 12 | |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Easy 9km | Easy 11km |
| Tuesday | 4 x 1km sub-threshold (10km total) | 6 x 1km sub-threshold (12km total) |
| Wednesday | Easy 8km | Easy 10km |
| Thursday | 2 x 2km sub-threshold (9km total) | 4 x 2km sub-threshold (14km total) |
| Friday | Easy 9km | Easy 13km |
| Saturday | Rest | Rest |
| Sunday | Rest | Rest |
| Total | 45km, 8km of quality | 60km, 14km of quality |
Look at it closely and you’ll notice nothing dramatic happens. Two reps get added here, a few easy kilometres there. That’s the whole trick.
Sub, not at
The hardest part of the method isn’t physical. It’s discipline.
Every runner I know, me included, is tempted to nudge sub-threshold reps up to threshold, and then a touch beyond, because it feels good and the watch looks nice. Do that and you’ve quietly turned a repeatable session into a hard one. You’ll need longer to recover, the next session suffers and the whole structure starts to wobble.
The fix is simple. Run to effort rather than pace, and check yourself with the talk test towards the end of each rep. If you can’t get a sentence out in one breath, you’ve overcooked it.
Why boring works
Hard sessions make you fit for a week. Repeatable ones make you fit for years.
A traditional track session leaves you on the floor, then costs you two or three days of feeling beaten up. Sub-threshold work leaves you tired but intact. You can do it again in 48 hours, and again two days after that. Over months, that adds up to far more quality running than a diet of hard sessions ever allows. The easy days aren’t filler either. They’re doing the unglamorous job of building the aerobic base that everything else sits on.
There’s also a psychological upside. When the week is the same every week, there’s nothing to dread and nothing to psych yourself up for. You just turn up. That’s where consistency actually comes from.
Where it falls short
It isn’t perfect, nor is it, as some claim, “the only training you need to do”.
It can feel monotonous. Some runners love the repetition; others are climbing the walls by week six. It’s also at its best for 10k up to the marathon. If your goal is a fast 5k, you’ll probably need some faster running at some point, whether that’s occasional VO2 max work or, my preference, racing regularly, which gives you that stimulus and a fitness check in one go. And it only works if your easy days are genuinely easy. Most runners run them too hard, which is the one mistake that unpicks everything else.
For the runners I coach, Norwegian Singles is usually a training block rather than the whole plan. What goes around it, and when, depends entirely on the person and the race.
Remember: the session you can repeat beats the session you can survive.