SESSION NOTES: Multimodal (637)
Every minute for 30 mins: Minute one box jump overs. Minute two rowing. Minute three air bike. Nominate a number of reps or distance for each exercise that will allow you to complete every round of the 30 minutes within 40-50 seconds. Your rate of perceived exertion should be 6/10 at the start, 7/10 in the middle and no more than 8/10 at the end. If you know your anaerobic threshold, work at that pace.
Programming Science:
The three movements have low interference, meaning you will be ‘shunting’ blood to different parts of the body, resulting in you being limited by cardiorespiratory endurance, not muscle stamina.
Based on the required intensities, this session has been designed to raise your aerobic threshold, increasing the time for which you can move without accumulating significant cell acidity.
Health and Body Composition Benefits:
Cardiorespiratory exercise has considerable health benefits, with this session creating favourable changes to cardiovascular disease (including reductions in blood pressure) and respiratory disease. This session will also lower your resting heart rate and increase blood flow to the brain.
The cyclical nature of some of the movements in this session are the most effective types of movements to stimulate the release of endorphins, feel good chemicals that will not only improve mood and mental health, but will also help to reduce pain levels in the body.
As a result of this style of session, you will experience changes in blood chemistry, including favourable effects on cholesterol, blood glucose, triglyceride and lipid levels.
Although this session isn’t optimally effective as a stand-alone method of modifying body composition and weight management, it will aid in reducing levels of body fat when included in conjunction with your strength and resistance training based sessions.
Similarly, although this style of session doesn’t have as powerful a long term effect on your resting metabolic rate as resistance-based exercise, cardiovascular exercise at high intensities will put your body into a prolonged state of ‘EPOC’ (excess post- exercise oxygen consumption), meaning you’ll continue burning energy long after you finish training – further aiding healthy body composition.
Performance Benefits:
The primary benefit of training for cardiorespiratory endurance from a performance perspective is to improve the ability of your body to sustain repeated muscle contractions.
This session achieves this by training the aerobic system and the lactate threshold. By training at the correct intensity in this session, we’re able to raise the threshold at which fatigue kicks in, specifically, the threshold at which you can move without accumulating significant call acidity. This results in the session not only improving your work rate, but also improving your ability to sustain a higher work rate for longer, with less fatigue.
As a result of this session, you’ll experience performance-boosting changes in intramuscular substrate storage (increasing energy availability for muscle contractions) and increased enzyme activities (increasing the rate of energy delivery to the muscles).
Additionally, the repetitive muscle contractions create positive changes at a muscular level.
The high repetition movements in this session train the ability of your muscles to resist fatigue – increasing their stamina. This comes from improvements in the efficiency of slow twitch (fatigue resistant) muscle fibres.
As a result of the volume of repetitions, this session will increase the mitochondrial density in your muscle cells, allowing them to more efficiently convert energy into fuel. This means you can sustain higher rates of muscle contraction before fatigue or failure.
The higher volumes will also increase capillary density in your muscles, allowing for efficient delivery of oxygen and fuel, and removal of waste products (further adding to the fatigue resistance).
These muscular changes also occur in the ventilatory muscles, improving breathing efficiency.
From a psychological point of view, if your pacing is correct, this session can be an effective method of entering a ‘flow state’, an optimal physical and mental zone which can help to maximise your performance.
Strategy:
Work out the volume of each exercise before you start that will take you 40-45 seconds to complete. This will drift out to 50 seconds as you fatigue and your cycle rate decreases. Set up movements closer together to minimise transition time. Choose a volume of each movement that will get uncomfortable.
How it Should Feel:
Your rate of perceived exertion should be 6/10 at the start, 7/10 in the middle and no more than 8/10 at the end. Bear in mind that 8/10 is a relatively high intensity – you should be uncomfortable, without ‘hitting the wall’.
Scaling Guidelines:
To preserve the intended stimulus of the session, ensure you’re scaling so you can keep moving non-stop for the 40-50 seconds. This means that a lighter weight for unbroken, higher reps, is better than a heavier weight with broken sets.
Common Mistakes:
Breaking up the exercises. Each exercise should be unbroken. If you can’t go unbroken for 45 seconds, use a lighter weight. Not choosing enough volume for each movement is the other common fault.
Incorrect selection of volume is another common fault. While this session should be completed at a sustainable pace, it should get uncomfortable in the final ten minutes. Ensure when you log this session, you log the volume of each movement, and whether the selection was correct, so you know for next time a movement is repeated in this format.
