Category: ENDURANCE 101

SOME VERY GENERAL GUIDELINES ON HOW TO TRAIN

 FOR WHAT & HOW:

Recovery: Light effort, RPE 2-3, 20-60 minutes steady/continuous

• You should feel GOOD after these sessions. Walks, yoga, maybe a light jog/bike ride depending on your fitness level. Good for mental health. Not necessary to recover well. You can lay in bed all day after a hard session & you’ll recover just fine.

General Aerobic Conditioning: Easy, RPE 3-4, 30 minutes to several hours steady/continuous

• The foundation! If you can slowly build up your speed at this intensity, you’ll be set up for success. Lots of cellular/metabolic adaptations happening here.

Aerobic Capacity/Movement Economy: Easy-Moderate, RPE 4-5, 30-120 minutes 0r more (depends on level), steady/continuous

• This is your “Zone 2” work – it’s very similar to general aerobic conditioning (see above), but there’s a slightly higher output and more muscle fiber recruitment. Beginners will usually spend most of their aerobic training here, because their pace at this intensity is still slow enough to not accumulate much muscular fatigue and you can really stack up the volume! Higher level athletes may do a mix of the two, with more of the aforementioned “general” aerobic conditioning, because they’ve now reached high enough speeds at this intensity to be taxing their bodies a bit more on a structural level (muscles, joints, etc).

Aerobic Capacity/Anaerobic Capacity, Economy: Moderate, “Fun Fast”, RPE 6-7, 10 – 20 minute intervals or steady/continuous up to 60 minutes

• While technically still “aerobic” training, your muscles are working harder now, so different systems start kicking in to support the aerobic system in producing energy. This is where many people operate when they go for a run without a structured training plan, just trying to wear themselves out for 30 minutes.
• While it’s true that you can train multiple systems at once here, it’s not a substitute for intentional, low intensity aerobic work. It will be more fatiguing and thus not allow you to accumulate the amount of volume that is required for you to continue building aerobic capacity. The great thing about those easier intensities is that your body can handle a lot! And aerobic adaptations respond well to volume. Bottom line, this intensity does have value, but shouldn’t be your meat & potatoes and will be most effective once you’ve developed a strong aerobic base (see above).  

Aerobic Power, Speed Endurance, Economy/Technique: Hard to very hard effort, RPE 8-9, intervals 30 seconds to 10 minutes

• Now training is starting to get sexy. Some people may feel a “burn” at this intensity but not be as fatigued cardiovascularly (I don’t think that’s a word). In this case, you might be better off building your muscular endurance before putting much focus here.

Power, Speed, Technique, Anaerobic Capacity/Endurance: Max effort, RPE 10, unsustainable/exhausting, intervals of 8 – 60 seconds

• This is a full sprint, short duration. All hands on deck. There’s gonna be a lag in HR because of how short the event is… so that’s not a great indicator of intensity here. Again, RPE scale. Start out with shorter bursts, like 10 second sprints and slowly work your way up to 30s sprints, 40s, even 60s. Take long rest periods (start with 3 min & just observe how long it takes to recover enough to sprint the same speed/distance each rep). If you’re noticing a drop in performance despite resting long enough, it’s time to call it. Start with low reps and work your way up.
• It’s important to note that the risk of injury here is high for beginners, so make sure you bake your cake in the right order and have a good foundation of strength (better be lifting!) and aerobic fitness to be able to recover well from / within this type of training.  

Very important:

1. Do the same things for a while and be as consistent as possible. You’ll see minimal results if you never give your body a chance to adapt to your current training. Don’t get impatient & then A. crank up the volume/intensity, or B. Program hop and hop and hop until the end of time.
2. Gradually increase the demands you place on your body (progressive overload). As you become fitter, you’ll need a greater stimulus to see progress.

Frequent small adjustments in the right direction > Beating the shit out of yourself at random.

You can implement progressive overload with several methods, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. Most methods fall under A. Volume (do more) or B. Intensity (do harder)

Building aerobic capacity over time requires that you progressively do more (volume). This is easy to do when you’re a beginner, as you have a longer runway to take off from. However, as your fitness improves and you close the gap of your potential, you’ll have less room to “just add volume” and will need to start toying with amount & type of high intensity.

Other things like strength, speed, hypertrophy (muscle growth), power, muscular endurance, etc etc etc.) need more specific methods of progressive overload.

And that is a topic for another time!

Thanks for reading!

Now that we have covered some basic principles and physiology contributing to endurance, you probably understand that different energy systems will respond best to different training methods. You must train both if you want to maximize your potential. A workout that is hugely beneficial to your aerobic system won’t benefit your anaerobic system to the same degree, and vice versa.

For example, you could target anaerobic endurance with 1-minute bouts of high intensity – whereas you’d target your aerobic endurance with bouts of several hours. Big difference there… and unfortunately you can’t optimize both in one training session (which is where the concept of “do more in less time” misses the mark). For this reason, you need to really think about the outcome you’re looking for and work backwards to determine what your training needs to look like.

That being said, we must bake our cake in the right order… and the main ingredient here is going to be a large aerobic capacity. This is the gas tank that allows you to get anywhere at all, no matter what speed. Think about it: if your gas tank has a 5-gallon capacity, you might go fast but not for long. Build your base to earn more, harder, faster.

The main goals of aerobic training are 1). increase your capacity for work, and 2). maximally utilize the capacity you already have.

Capacity training improves your long-term potential and is typically the first order of business when building your aerobic base. Higher intensity “utilization training” displays what you’ve already built and models more specifically the demands of whatever you’re training for.

Typically, you’d apply higher intensities progressively once your aerobic capacity is in a good enough spot to handle (more and more of) it. This is why, if the average person tried to go out and replicate the training of an elite athlete (without the years-built capacity they have), it wouldn’t end well.

Aerobic capacity training, as we touched on in previous posts, teaches your body to produce energy via the aerobic pathway (a much more sustainable route for the body to take long term). It takes a long time to build, but the results will be long-lasting and feel like money in the bank. You’ll have a solid foundation to layer on more “utilization” training (harder, faster, & more specific to your sport if you’re not purely a long-distance endurance athlete) and thus be the best version of you! 😊

That being said…Once you’ve finally built yourself a huge gas tank, you still need to maintain it year-round. Not always pushing volume like crazy, but enough to maintain what you’ve built (this amount will be individual).

If you let your aerobic capacity wither away in favor of more and more hard conditioning, that hard conditioning won’t benefit you in the same way. When your capacity is sufficient (and stays sufficient), you fully reap the benefits of more specific, higher intensity training.

So, what does it look like to develop your aerobic base?

Lots of low to moderate intensity/zone 2 cardio (modalities with high cycle rate & low load like running, biking, swimming, even elliptical are ideal). It’s very important that you stay true to the LOW intensity part. Could you carry on a conversation in full sentences? Could you sustain it for a couple hours? Could you basically float into a daydream while doing it? Then you’re probably good.

Start with a volume you can easily manage and recover well from. This will vary greatly between individuals. From there, gradually increase your weekly time/duration/distance (volume) of slow & low training! This training, once again, should be easy enough that we are able to accumulate a LOT of it. Aerobic adaptations respond best to volume! This is how you build your body to be an oxygen-delivering machine.

An important note: intensity and intention – in other words, how it feels – is far more important than how it looks. If you are being honest with yourself, your “aerobic” or “zone 2” pace might look like a grandma shuffle/speed walk. That’s FINE. Ditch the expectations and give yourself permission to go slow & have more in the tank by the end…

…Because you understand the forces at play now, and you’ll be grateful you baked your cake in the right order down the line when it’s a damn good cake. 😊

In parts 1 – 3 we discussed a few key concepts:

• Endurance is basically your body’s ability to delay fatigue.
• Fatigue is the result of your body no longer efficiently producing energy (ATP).
• Good endurance/conditioning is the result of multiple metabolic systems in the body being well-trained & developed (and thus being able to efficiently produce ATP for longer and thus delaying fatigue… see how it all comes together)
• We touched on the AEROBIC system, which supports you in long-duration/low intensities.
• We touched on the ANAEROBIC system, which supports you in short-duration/high intensities.
• We discussed the fact that while they work together, the optimal way to train each of them looks a bit different (intentional long/easy work, intentional short/hard work, 80/20 split easy/hard)
• Finally (in part 3) we discussed the profound importance of having a well-developed aerobic system AKA aerobic base. Basically, sprints and metcons without intentional & separate aerobic capacity training will only take you so far.

Now that we’re caught up on some basic concepts, I want to talk about an often-overlooked aspect of conditioning/endurance: TECHNIQUE.

Whatever you do – run, bike, swim, fight, dance, hike – how efficient you are with the mechanics/movements is a crucial aspect of your durability within the activity. Your nervous system has an incredible ability to adapt very specifically to the movement patterns you repeat in order to expend less energy while still getting the job done.

Take running, for example. Even a slight variation like the surface you’re on (road, treadmill, trail) is taken into consideration by the body as it figures out the “path of least resistance” (path of least calories expended to run). This explains why many people who predominantly run on the road find themselves getting fatigued sooner when they hit the trails – even when the trails are flat. Your body doesn’t have the same hours of experience there and therefore hasn’t built trail-specific efficiency!

This is one reason why you can’t become a better runner just by jump-roping, for example. Even though you could technically train the same necessary systems, build a monster gas tank, and *systemically* develop phenomenal conditioning, it will leave you lacking the movement efficiency it takes to be an all-star runner. In short, you gotta run to run fast, bike to bike fast, hike to hike fast, and so on.

That being said, there is absolutely a place for non-specific training (like hopping on the stationary bike for a long aerobic session, even if your goals are running-focused). That’s a topic for another time.

If you’ve worked in Wildland Fire, how many guys can you think of who were slow on the crew PT runs but would absolutely destroy everyone on the hikes? This is what I’m talking about. Years spent walking up and down steep slopes created movement efficiency/specific conditioning (patterns repeated over and over again). It’s a nervous system thing.

For example, if you’re specifically trying to improve your endurance swimming, *most* of your weekly volume should be spent swimming. HOWEVER, the amount of specific training you should be doing is going to depend on a few things:

1. Your training experience/history… for example, if you want to be a great runner, but you haven’t been consistently running, it would be a good idea to mix up your modalities first as you build more general conditioning and slowly work up your capacity to handle higher volumes of running. The more conditioned you become, the more specific training you can handle and also the more specific training you might require in order to progress.
2. On the other side of that, if you’re an advanced runner and your capacity for weekly training volume is now very high, it would be a wise choice to spend some time in non-specific modalities, like doing a longer steady state session on the stationary bike or elliptical in order to mitigate the local fatigue & impact you’d get from yet another run.
3. How taxing is the thing you’re training for? For example, if you’re training to hike faster up a mountain with a ton of weight on your back, I wouldn’t recommend going for a 60lb hike every day. This will accumulate unnecessary fatigue and limit your ability to train your aerobic system exclusively as well as just limit how much volume you can do per week (you need a good amount of volume to improve your aerobic capacity). Spend some time running, bodyweight hiking, and even swimming or biking as you start to increase your weekly volume.
4. How measurable is the thing you’re training for? For example, if your goal is to improve your conditioning during rounds of sparring in Jiu Jitsu, it might be very difficult to measure things like perceived exertion or metrics of improvement week to week – which I think is very important if you’re following a conditioning program. So, it might benefit you to utilize more general modalities – like running, elliptical, swimming, biking, jump-rope, etc. and get your *specific* conditioning done on the mats!

I hope this was helpful. If you haven’t checked out parts 1, 2, and 3 – you can find them in the category “Endurance 101” right below the Title of this post. Thanks so much for reading 😊 See you in Part 5!

Last week we touched on the importance of developing a strong aerobic base if you wish to improve your conditioning. This looks like a lot of long, easy-ish hours in your modality of choice (bike, swim, run, hike, whatever) at a pace you could hold a conversation at.

These adaptations takes a long time to develop (several months, even years) so you’ve gotta have patience, show up, and trust the process. 

On the other hand, the changes you’ll see from higher intensity training often happen much faster than those from low intensity training. You’ll see rapid improvement if you started out with relatively poor conditioning, so it may be tempting to just stick with your sprints… But in the long run, this will stop you short of your potential. 

So what’s the deal with HIIT training?

High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is a term that has been somewhat bastardized by the fitness industry in an attempt to sell you yet another shortcut (in this case, to better conditioning) — accomplish more with less time!

Effective high intensity training typically consists of short periods of VERY hard work followed by periods of complete rest or low intensity “recovery”. Most group classes labeled as “HIIT” often have folks rushing between exercises operating at a moderate intensity with minimal rest. 

This is not to say you can’t improve your cardiovascular health at orange theory! You absolutely can, and sometimes people simply need to get moving and the energy + social aspect of these spaces is really helpful. 

BUT — if you are serious about improving your performance, it will only take you so far. 

True high intensity training is crucial — I am not poo-pooing it — but it’s not going to replace your long, easy hours. It’s meant to be layered on top. There are no short cuts (I know, bummer). 

Oftentimes people assume that because they felt that pesky fatigue start to kick in at higher intensities (super steep inclines, the last leg of a race, etc) that they should improve the system in charge of high intensity. However, it’s not that simple. 

It’s all connected. 

If your aerobic system (“gas tank”) is well-trained, you’ll simply be able to do more (faster, longer, happier). 

And!!! You’ll be able to RECOVER better from your workouts.  A strong aerobic system will allow you to recover quicker from high intensity training as well as higher volumes of lower intensity. You’ll even notice an improvement in your recovery BETWEEN SETS in the weight room. 

So, if you want the ability to handle more training & THUS move past your current limits, you have to make sure your aerobic system is in good shape. Try to move past these limits without the ability to recover from more training, and, well… good luck. You’ll be humbled or hurt or both.

First, let’s recap Pt. 1 real quick:

1. ATP fuels muscles & gets eaten up in the process
2. Metabolism is the process of ATP being re-produced
3. The body has options when it comes to which pathway/system it will take to produce ATP (we discussed aerobic & anaerobic)
4. The faster ATP gets recycled, the more work you can do / sec
5. So, more ATP =  more power = more speed

Endurance is the ability to sustain quick production of ATP (speed), mostly through the aerobic pathway, for a long time (harder better faster stronger). This is what people mean when they say conditioning is a “metabolic quality”. Metabolism isn’t just about how much food we can eat.

So, we already covered the two main systems at work. The anaerobic system & the aerobic system. Which system is putting in more work depends on intensity (we know anaerobic is better for high intensity & aerobic has a limit), genetics, training history (whatever you do more of you tend to be better at).

During these processes, there are a few different byproducts produced in the body. I won’t get into the weeds here, but just know that these byproducts can disrupt homeostasis & cause fatigue if they aren’t dealt with efficiently in the body. People with higher aerobic capacities have cells that do a great job dealing with said byproducts (thus keeping the body in its happy place) at higher outputs (they can go pretty fast without a lot of fatigue – and even faster if they’re okay with more fatigue).

So, bottom line – if you don’t have a high aerobic capacity, you might be able to go fast but you won’t get far! And even during shorter events, you’re probably not going as fast as you could if you’d done the work to maximize both systems. For this reason, a common practice is to spend a good amount of time building up an “aerobic base” before incorporating much high-intensity work. Beyond this, you’ll see many athletes roughly adhering to the 80/20 rule (80% low intensity aerobic work, 20% high intensity).

This is all great news – there’s a way! But aerobic capacity takes time to build. Long duration, lots of volume, gradual increases. You’ve got to be patient, diligent, and trust the process. Remember, by training aerobic capacity, you’re teaching your body to recycle ATP via the aerobic pathway. A great way to do this is by repeatedly depleting your glycogen stores (which takes a while, hence the long sessions @ lower intensities). This is why effective endurance training has a lot of “easy” volume. You can build your capacity without the fatigue of lots of high intensity work & thus recover adequately.

If you really want great conditioning, you must maximize your aerobic fitness. You must clock the long, tedious hours to change your body. A lot is happening beneath the surface on a cellular and structural level, just be patient.

If you just read to here, I love you. Hang in there, we’ll get into programming in the real world very soon. 😊

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK FOR PART 3: What about HIIT?

Endurance is your ability to run, hike, bike, fight, you name it – for an extended period of time. It’s the maximum pace/speed you can sustain for the duration of said activity before you get tired and have to slow down (fatigue). Endurance is limited by fatigue. So, the goal of endurance training is (you guessed it): fatigue resistance (delaying the inevitable).

What causes fatigue?

• Your body’s inability to meet energy demands (either you don’t have enough reserves or your body isn’t efficiently using what it already has)
• Certain metabolites accumulating or diminishing
• Reduced motor nerve signal

Your brain is the ultimate regulator of your endurance/fatigue (brain always gets final say). No matter what causes the fatigue, your brain will respond by telling your body to slow down. So, endurance is not just about pushing through the pain. It’s about making sure fatigue doesn’t hit you for as long as possible, (thus preventing your brain from slowing your body down).

SO, good conditioning/endurance training raises the limit of how much you can do before that fatigue signal has the brain shut everything down.

What are you training when you train for endurance?

As you might have guessed, your <3 heart <3 is doing most of the work to send oxygen out to the body. The more efficient your heart is at delivering oxygen, the more conditioned you’ll be (probably). The good news: the heart is a super teachable muscle. You can actually train it to pump out more oxygen with each heartbeat (& thus improve delivery to your muscles & thus delay fatigue).

The next piece of the puzzle is how well your muscles utilize that oxygen once they get it. This is dependent on the muscles’ “aerobic” qualities (also very trainable). During any exercise, your brain controls which muscle fibers are being activated and for how long.

Most activities favor a certain type of muscle fiber, and you can train these fibers depending on the adaptation you want (strength, speed, power, endurance, etc). For example, long steady-state training improves the aerobic (oxygen using) qualities of your slow twitch muscle fibers. Short bursts of high intensity train the anaerobic qualities of mostly fast-twitch muscle fibers.

So, good conditioning/endurance training doesn’t target just one system, but rather multiple systems working together. You have to train each system appropriately in order for your body to become fatigue resistant as a whole and reach your true potential as an athlete. The primary systems I’m talking about are the aerobic system & anaerobic system. They are connected. If you only focus your time/energy on one, you’ll eventually hit a plateau and come up with some bullshit narrative that you’re “not built for endurance”.

Moving on! <3

People who have great endurance/conditioning (these terms used interchangeably):

• Can take up and use a lot of oxygen during exercise (Vo2 max)
• Are very efficient in their movements (technique that doesn’t take unnecessary energy AND efficient metabolic processes…they’re efficient inside & out!)
• Can produce and sustain a good amount of energy/output (key word: sustain (lactate threshold))

One last thing for part 1. Stay with me!

Let’s talk briefly about ATP. ATP is a molecule inside every single cell that holds energy. Think of it like your body’s currency (the more intense an activity the more (ATP) expensive it is. So, the faster your body can pump out & recycle ATP, the faster you’ll be able to go for anything beyond like 5 seconds. So, we want our body to be churning out (and properly utilizing) ATP out like a MF so you can go faster longer.

The body takes two main routes to fuel activity (supply ATP):

1. Anaerobic glycolysis – great for high intensity because this pathway can supply more ATP immediately.
2. Aerobic – produces much more ATP, but it’s a slower-process & therefore better for long-duration stuff.

IN SUMMARY: improving endurance/conditioning is about training the different metabolic processes & systems (how your body produces energy to get ‘er done), not about redlining as long as you can every workout*.

*Should you redline as hard as you can sometimes? Hell yeah! But it’s probably less than you think.

🙂

That’s all for right now! Stay tuned for PT. 2 where we’ll cover the science a bit more and also start the discussion of what this stuff actually looks like when applied in real life!

Thanks for being here!