Measuring Aerobic and Anaerobic Function
With proper equipment from exercise physiology labs or clinics, it’s relatively easy to measure the amount of sugar and fat the body is using at various heartrates. Agasanalyzer can provide a fairly accurate percentage of these two main energy sources. The respiratory quotient (RQ) or respiratory exchange ratio (RER), measures the amount of carbon dioxide exhaled divided by the oxygen consumed. This is translated to a scale of 0.7 (hypothetically, 100 percent fat burning) to 1.0 (100 percent sugar burning). For example, a ratio of .85 indicates that about 50 percent of your energy is derived from sugar, and the other half from fat.

Generally, those who don’t rest enough don’t recover as well—from training, competition, and all other physical activity. Poor or incomplete recovery can lead to reduced development of the aerobic system, overtraining, and as a result, can prevent people from reaching their athletic potential. Recovery allows the muscles and other working parts to rebuild and prepare for the next bout of training, and it especially prepares the athlete to compete. During recovery, three activities are very important: no training, little physical activity, and sufficient sleep.

For many athletes, the solution to balancing the training equation is to either reduce the daily physical chores, reduce training (and competition), or a combination of all. For professional athletes and others with the benefit of being able to reduce daily chores, more time and energy can be focused on training (although more is not necessarily better). It often means cutting down on training to keep the equation balanced. When this happens, improved performance ultimately follows.

One of my patients, whom I will call Bob, was a good local runner who loved road racing and desperately wanted to improve. But his expanding business and growing family were demanding more time from his busy training schedule. He tried to accommodate everyone and maintain his training. He was waking up earlier in the morning to train, resulting in less sleep. He soon was complaining of fatigue that lasted all day, and eventually developed pain in his knees and lower back. In the middle of a very successful racing season, his performances quickly began to deteriorate. At this point he consulted me. The first thing I recommended for Bob was that he cut his training down by about 40 percent, since he was not able to decrease any of his other commitments. Almost immediately his energy improved and his physical problems disappeared. After about four weeks on his modified schedule, Bob ran a great race and continued racing well for the rest of the season, maintaining his reduced training schedule.

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Endurance sports has existed for millions of years in its most natural form, and organized forms only quite recently, with participation in endurance events such as road running, triathlons, and cycling exploding in the past thirty years. Today’s endurance athletes, who far outnumber athletes who participate in shorter or sprint events, have been influenced more by the philosophies used to train sprinters than by distance coaches, athletes, and others. This is due, in part, to the presence of many former sprinters, for example, who began coaching in the endurance world. They began training endurance athletes much in the same way they themselves trained. As a result, endurance athletes often hold on to that tradition of sprint workouts. These include track or pool intervals, for example, to increase speed. This relatively new training approach may have contributed to the epidemic of overtraining, chronic injuries, and burnout, and may have prevented many endurance athletes from reaching their potential.

As noted above, endurance is very different from true sprinting: Endurance is performed at sub-maximal exertion while sprinters perform at maximal effort. When endurance athletes train like sprinters, the risk of injury and overtraining rises significantly because this kind of speed is not regularly used in endurance events (and if it is, it can detract from the race by using up glycogen, over-stressing muscles, and lowering energy).