SESSION NOTES: Multi-Modal (661)

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.

The need to ‘negative split’ (second half faster than first) this session trains self awareness of ability, and ensures you reduce intensity initially to remain below the anaerobic threshold.

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.

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.

By requiring a negative split, the session also trains your ability to pace a longer, aerobic session correctly.

This session is all about the ‘negative split’, completing the second half faster than the first. The challenge is in making the second half faster than the first, while still keeping the total time as low as possible.

On your timer, hit the ‘lap’ or ‘split’ button after the first round, then again at the end of the session. This will give you your split time.

It will take some practice to build the self awareness needed to achieve the session goal. If you don’t have a high level of awareness, a good rule of thumb is to start slower than you think, then gradually build the effort level once you hit the second round.

For any movements you need to break up, complete short sets with short breaks, rather than bigger sets (which will push you over the anaerobic threshold). Where possible however, the goal should be to slow down the cycle rate of movements rather than break them up.

You should be in control of your performance at the half-way point. You need to determine the speed of movement, rather than the session determining it for you.

The second round should be uncomfortable, with the final round being a big fight to ensure a negative split.

Where applicable, choose weights that allow you to keep moving with short breaks only.

If you do need to reduce the total volume (under the guidance of your coach), ensure the second round is two thirds as big as the first, and the third round is one third as big as the first.

Not recording the split time, and/or not approaching this session with the aim of achieving a negative split. This is a very important factor to ensure the benefits of this session are achieved.

Starting too fast is also a common problem for beginners or those with low self-awareness of ability.

For some, it’s possible to be too conservative at the start. In a perfect world, the second half should be faster than the first half by only a matter of seconds – and it should take a big effort in the final round to achieve that.