Trail Mix | Why do we call workouts ‘workouts’ when they’re fun and work is not?
- Running does not feel much like work – in fact, it’s a break from work for many, except we insist on calling physical training sessions workouts
The first time I came across and properly registered the word “workout” was in 2013, the summer before my first year at college. The varsity cross-country and track coach had sent the incoming freshmen runners a preseason training programme for the summer, with a heavy emphasis on aerobic base-building and working up towards some faster, more intense running by mid-August.
The weekly schedule included generic runs (which meant running by feel), long runs, tempo runs, steady-state runs, and recovery runs. And “workouts”.
The word was a new one to me, even though the underlying concept was not. I intuitively grasped what “workout” meant – a specific, vigorous session of training.
Workoutsare used to target factors such as aerobic and anaerobic thresholds, speed, and power, and could take the form of say, five repetitions of 1,500m, or a pyramid of one-two-three-four-five-four-three-two-one minutes of hard running, or 15 one-minute sprints up a hill. I had run workouts before seeing them described as such; it was just that I was accustomed to calling them “programmes” or “training sessions”. Among the Hong Kong road running community that I had been training with, running a workout was called “running a programme”.