Karsten Warholm’s Training: Inside the Ulsteinvik Method
There is a number that defines Karsten Warholm: 45.94. It is the world record he ran in the 400-meter hurdles final at the Tokyo Olympics, a time more than three-quarters of a second faster than anyone had ever run the event — a performance that shattered a record which had stood for 29 years. But the number that explains Warholm is not a time. It is a schedule: three brutal days a week, at a training facility in Oslo, under the eye of one coach, Leif Olav Alnes. This is the Ulsteinvik method — the training world that built the fastest hurdler in history.
From multi-eventer to hurdling machine
Warholm was born in Ulsteinvik, a small coastal town on Norway’s west coast, and he did not start out as a hurdler at all. As a youth athlete his focus was the octathlon and then the decathlon — the multi-event disciplines that demand a bit of everything. In 2015 he moved to Oslo to train with Alnes, a coach who saw in the teenager something the results did not yet show. Alnes was the one who always believed the 46-second barrier could be broken, even when the rest of the athletics world treated it as a wall.
The partnership worked immediately and has never broken. Alnes oversaw Warholm’s conversion from a promising multi-eventer into the best 400-meter hurdler the world had ever seen: world champion in London in 2017, world champion again in Doha in 2019, then the Tokyo masterpiece. Along the way there were European titles indoors and outdoors, and a world record at the Oslo Diamond League — 46.70 seconds, run in front of a home crowd — that served as the warning shot for what came in Tokyo weeks later.
The 2017 world title also gave the world its first viral Warholm image: his incredulous, wide-eyed stare as he crossed the line in London, instantly compared to Edvard Munch’s The Scream — another Norwegian icon. After Tokyo, some dubbed the sequel “The Scream, Part II.” The face is the product, and the training is the factory.
Three red days a week
The structure of Warholm’s training is deceptively simple and famously punishing. The week is divided into three hard days, three easier days, and one day of rest. The hard days are usually Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; the easier days Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday; Sunday is for recovery. But “hard” in the Warholm-Alnes vocabulary means something specific.
On the hard days, Warholm arrives at the training facility at around 10 in the morning and does not leave until 7 in the evening. He does not do two separate sessions with a long break in between, the way distance runners often double. Instead he stays at the facility for the entire day — training, eating, recovering, training again — in one continuous block. The reason is practical and revealing: his warm-up is extremely long and meticulous, a cornerstone of his injury prevention, and doing it twice in a day would be wasteful. So he warms up once, then works for hours.
These are the “red” days, and they are so demanding that Warholm frequently rips his shirt off in practice from the exertion — the same gesture the world saw in Tokyo after the 45.94, which his coach had witnessed countless times in training and thought nothing of. Unlike distance runners, who build a base and then sharpen, Warholm trains at high intensity virtually all year round. The difference is that the output changes with the season: the splits he hits for 60-meter repeats in the autumn, when training volume is highest, are slower than the splits he hits when Alnes sharpens him for championship finals.
The lactate sessions
At the heart of the method are the lactate sessions — brutal interval workouts monitored through blood lactate measurements, the Norwegian endurance tradition applied to a sprint-hurdles event. The sessions are designed to push Warholm’s body to the precise edge where speed endurance is built without tipping into destructive overload. It is training as laboratory science, with Alnes as the scientist and Warholm as both subject and collaborator.
The philosophy behind it is pure Alnes. “It is better to stumble in the right direction than to walk vigorously in the wrong way,” the coach has said — a line that captures the entire project. They are willing to get sessions wrong, to misjudge a workout, to experiment at the edge of what is possible, because that is the price of pushing the limits of human performance. The 45.94 was not an accident. It was the product of years of deliberate stumbling in the right direction.
The mentality: watching the masterpiece
Perhaps the strangest detail of the Warholm story is his relationship with his own world record. “I watch it every time I have a bad day and need some motivation to go to practice,” he told the BBC. “It gives me goosebumps every time.” But he is wary of watching it too often. The record is so enormous — so far beyond what anyone thought possible — that it could hold him back as easily as propel him forward. Chasing his own ghost gets him nowhere.
After Tokyo, Warholm spoke about needing new yardsticks. “I need to find a new approach in the way I see my races,” he said. “In Tokyo, I came as close to perfection as I could given my level that day — 45.94 is a whole other level.” The goal became stability at a higher level: running 46.50 in the first race of the season and holding it, rather than chasing the perfect race again. Even perfection, he admitted, had flaws — his last 100 meters in Tokyo, always his most challenging section, were among his better races but still not perfect. In theory, they think it can be improved. In practice, “it will be very difficult.”
The Paris silver and the road ahead
At the Paris Olympics in 2024, Warholm took silver in 47.06 seconds, beaten by his great American rival Rai Benjamin. It was a reminder that even the fastest hurdler in history cannot control everything — rivals improve, conditions vary, and the perfect race remains elusive. He added another European title in Rome that year in 46.98, proof that the machine still runs.
The Ulsteinvik method endures because it is not really about one race or one record. It is about a system: one athlete, one coach, a decade of trust, and a willingness to suffer in a very specific, very scientific way, three days a week, in Oslo. The world record was the headline. The method is the story — and it is still being written.
The Warholm record book: a championship timeline
The Ulsteinvik method is best judged by what it produced. From a teenage multi-eventer to the fastest 400m hurdler in history, the progression under Leif Olav Alnes was startlingly fast:
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2015 | Moves to Oslo to train full-time with coach Leif Olav Alnes, switching focus from multi-events to the 400m hurdles. |
| 2017 | World champion in the 400m hurdles in London — the first major title. |
| 2018 | European champion in Berlin. |
| 2019 | World champion again in Doha; breaks the world indoor 400m record (45.05) in Glasgow. |
| 2021 | Olympic gold in Tokyo in 45.94 seconds — a world record and the first sub-46-second 400m hurdles ever run. |
| 2022 | A hamstring injury wrecks the season; finishes seventh at the World Championships in Eugene. |
| 2023 | World champion for the third time in Budapest, announcing the comeback. |
| 2024 | Olympic silver in Paris (47.06) behind Rai Benjamin; European champion in Rome (46.98). |
The five pillars of the Ulsteinvik method
Strip away the legend and the Warholm–Alnes system rests on five principles, described consistently in interviews and training analyses over the years:
| Pillar | What it means |
|---|---|
| 1. Three red days | Monday, Wednesday and Friday are full-day hard sessions — Warholm reportedly arrives around 10am and trains into the evening, rather than splitting the work into two short sessions. |
| 2. Lactate science | Brutal interval sessions monitored through blood-lactate measurements: the Norwegian endurance tradition — controlled threshold work over all-out destruction — applied to a sprint-hurdles event. |
| 3. Hurdle rhythm as speed | Technique is treated as a weapon. Warholm reportedly moved from 14 to 13 steps between hurdles, turning stride pattern into free speed. |
| 4. Strength and robustness | Heavy gym work builds the durability to survive a workload that would break most sprinters. |
| 5. The masterpiece mindset | Alnes frames every season around the pursuit of the perfect race — and Warholm replays his own world record on bad days for motivation, careful never to let it become a cage. |
FAQ: Karsten Warholm’s training method
Who is Karsten Warholm’s coach?
Leif Olav Alnes, who has coached Warholm since the athlete moved to Oslo in 2015. Alnes is the architect of the method — the lactate science, the red-day structure, and the “masterpiece” mentality — and one of the most successful hurdles coaches in history.
What is a “red day” in Warholm’s training?
A hard training day — one of three per week (usually Monday, Wednesday, Friday). On red days Warholm reportedly spends most of the day at the training facility, doing extended lactate and hurdle sessions rather than two brief workouts with a long break between.
What is Karsten Warholm’s world record?
45.94 seconds for the 400m hurdles, set winning Olympic gold in Tokyo in 2021. It was the first time anyone had broken 46 seconds, and it smashed his own previous record by an extraordinary margin.
Why did Warholm change his stride pattern?
He reportedly moved from 14 to 13 steps between hurdles — a change that demands more speed and power but shortens the race, hurdle by hurdle. It was a key technical ingredient in the world-record run.
What happened to Warholm at the Paris Olympics?
He took silver in 47.06 seconds, beaten by his great American rival Rai Benjamin. He added the European title in Rome that same year in 46.98 — proof, as ever, that the machine still runs.
Will anyone break 45.94?
The record was considered close to the theoretical limit of the event when it was set. Rivals like Benjamin and Alison dos Santos keep improving, and Warholm himself continues to chase the perfect race — but 45.94 remains one of the most formidable records in athletics.
Sources & Further Reading
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