SESSION NOTES: Continuous Cardiovascular (123)
Run, row, ski or cycle (preferably your weakness) for an unbroken 35 minutes. Work at a pace you could comfortably maintain for 60 minutes (approximately 6/10 rate of perceived exertion). If you know your anaerobic threshold, exercise as close to it as possible.
Programming Science:
Although intensity is an important element of an exercise program, there is much benefit to be gained from longer, less intense efforts.
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 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.
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. By choosing your weakest movement, you’re specifically conditioning the parts of your body that will give the most benefit.
This session achieves this by training the oxidative energy system which generates ‘ATP’ (adenosine triphosphate) which fuels movement. By completing this session and training this energy system, we’re able to raise the threshold at which fatigue kicks in. 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.
This longer duration session trains the ‘oxidative’ energy system and increases the time at which you can work without accumulating significant call acidity, improving the body’s ability to burn fuel efficiently.
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:
Start at a pace you know you can maintain relatively comfortably and hold this pace throughout.
How it Should Feel:
You should be working at a rate of perceived exertion of about 6/10. Your muscles should be working, but not burning. While you should be out of breath and slightly uncomfortable, it shouldn’t be unbearable to the point of not being enjoyable.
Scaling Guidelines:
Maintain the length of session, and ensure you’re working at a pace that is maintainable for you. Modify around injuries with exercises as close as possible to the stimulus of the movement you’re modifying.
Common Mistakes:
Choosing multiple movements to complete instead of just one. Doing this will still improve your cardiorespiratory endurance, but won’t have the same beneficial effects on more localised muscular endurance and stamina.
Working too hard is also a common fault. If you don’t feel like you could maintain the pace for an hour, you’re going too fast. It’s common to start too fast, and finish too fast. Hold a comfortable pace throughout.
Working too hard will mean you don’t experience the benefits of training the oxidative energy system. More intensity is not always better.
