Increasing the efficiency of the aerobic system boosts the anaerobic threshold and power.

The anaerobic threshold represents the outer limits of your aerobic system. For instance, after sprinting, you must return to your energetic base, which is your aerobic system. And if you are tired and sucking wind after your sprint or sprints, then you need more aerobic training, not anaerobic.

A powerful aerobic system increases the level of training you can recover and adapt from, creating a higher ceiling for performance. This means it increases your ability to perform repeated maximal exercise bouts like sprints, reducing fatigue. An anaerobic exercise like sprints is highly influenced by the nature of both training and recovery periods during play.

The player who can maximize their aerobic system and integrate it with anaerobic training will significantly boost performance.

How Aerobic Training Supports ATP-PC and Lactate Anaerobic

Improved Recovery Between Explosive Efforts

High-speed and high-power activities, such as sprinting or explosive movements in sports, primarily rely on the (ATP-PC) and glycolytic energy systems.

The trained aerobic system enhances recovery between these intense bursts of activity. After a short, explosive effort, the body must recover quickly to perform the next burst effectively and maximally. So, an efficient aerobic system helps clear metabolic byproducts and replenish energy stores more rapidly during these intervals, allowing you to maintain consistent speed and power output maximally.

Enhanced Muscle Endurance

The ability to sustain power output over an extended period is crucial in sports. For example, sprinting, blocking, chasing down a fly ball, etc. While anaerobic systems dominate during high-intensity moments, the overall energy demands of a game have a mix of intensities. For instance, during a 20-second sprint, your body uses about 20% aerobic and 80% anaerobic, respectively.

A well-trained aerobic system contributes to better muscle endurance. It delays the transition to glycolytic metabolism during sustained high-power efforts, allowing you to maintain power longer before fatigue sets in.

Improved Mental Focus and Decision-Making

High-speed and high-power activities require quick decision-making and sharp mental focus. Aerobic training has been shown to positively impact cognitive function and mental clarity by preventing fatigue after an anaerobic bout, like sprinting. For example, after sprinting down the field, being tired will affect your skills and thinking.

The player with improved mental focus can better execute complex movements, techniques, and strategies at high speeds, leading to more efficient and precise movements that enhance power and speed.

Reduced Fatigue-Induced Mistakes

Fatigue leads to reduced motor control and coordination, potentially increasing the likelihood of mistakes compromising speed and power.

An efficient aerobic system helps delay the onset of fatigue, allowing you to maintain technique, form, and power output even during the later stages of a match or competition. Also, you can be more engaged on the second and third attempts as needed and not tired.

Aerobic Efficiency and Endurance

The aerobic system has gotten a bad name. Social media influencers who know nothing about physiology, only “bro-science,” have deemed the aerobic system ineffective and useless.

The aerobic system is an essential component to becoming a great athlete.

The aerobic system’s efficiency directly impacts your overall endurance and capacity to sustain effort over time. Think of it like this: driving your car on cruise control is the aerobic system. The accelerator is the anaerobic system. If you stomp on the accelerator, you activate the ATP-PC system. And if you slow down but continue to go fast, you activate the glycolytic system. When you take your foot off the accelerator, you return to cruise control speed.

Improved cardiovascular fitness enhances oxygen delivery to the working muscles, significantly boosting exercise intensity before crossing the anaerobic threshold. The anaerobic threshold marks when energy demands outpace the aerobic system’s capacity to supply it, leading to reliance on anaerobic processes and eventual fatigue.

When you possess elevated aerobic fitness levels, your cardiovascular system can transport oxygen to muscles, ensuring a consistent supply during exercise or performance. With increased oxygen availability, muscles can generate energy through aerobic metabolism for extended periods and at higher intensities before the switch to anaerobic metabolism occurs.

In simpler terms, being aerobically sustains higher-intensity workouts and delays the point where the anaerobic system switches on.

The more you increase the power of your aerobic system, the more you preserve the energy of the anaerobic system. The aerobic system is not weak. It can be strong but not as strong as the other systems. It is the base governing effect of energy.

Mitochondria

Mitochondria primarily play a role in aerobic metabolism, as they produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a process that relies on oxygen. Most importantly, mitochondria are only created and become more effective from aerobic training.

Mitochondria indirectly influence anaerobic metabolism in several ways.

ATP Regeneration

The ATP-PC system is activated by maximally high-intensity anaerobic exercise using ATP and phosphocreatine. These stores are minimal and deplete quickly during high-intensity efforts, typically lasting within the first 10 seconds.

Mitochondria help regenerate ATP between these bursts of anaerobic effort when the aerobic system is highly active to recover energy. After an intense burst of exercise, when oxygen becomes available again, mitochondria can help resynthesize ATP and restore your energy reserves, allowing for repeated bursts of anaerobic work. But if your aerobic system is not trained, you will be gassed with your hands on your knees, sucking wind.

The great thing about the ATP-PC system is that it takes 3 minutes to replenish it fully, about 60-70% in 90 seconds, and 30-50% within 30 seconds. So, the effects of your aerobic training increase the amount and effectiveness of the mitochondria to rapidly improve the speed of these recovery times.

Lactate Clearance

During intense anaerobic exercise, your muscles produce lactate as a byproduct of anaerobic glycolysis. Mitochondria metabolize lactate, reducing its buildup and preventing muscle fatigue. This means that mitochondria can prolong your ability to perform anaerobic exercises by facilitating lactate removal.

Oxygen Utilization: The more efficiently the aerobic system utilizes oxygen, the faster and more effectively it can clear lactate. The aerobic system uses oxygen to convert lactate into energy. This process, known as oxidative phosphorylation, occurs in the mitochondria and involves the complete breakdown of lactate into ATP.

Reducing Fatigue: Efficient lactate clearance contributes to reducing muscle fatigue. Lactate accumulation is associated with a drop in pH (acidosis), which impairs muscle function. The aerobic system’s ability to clear lactate helps maintain a more neutral pH environment, delaying the onset of fatigue during high-intense activity.

Enhanced Recovery: An efficient aerobic system supports overall recovery between high-intensity efforts. This is crucial for athletes engaging in interval training or sports with intermittent bursts of intensity, where the glycolytic system is repeatedly activated.

Improved Endurance: Training that enhances aerobic capacity improves the endurance of the entire energy system. As the aerobic system becomes more efficient, the body becomes better at handling the demands of aerobic and anaerobic (glycolytic) activities, contributing to overall athletic performance.

Muscle Recovery

After intense anaerobic exercise, your body enters a recovery phase. Mitochondria play a critical role in this process by repairing and replenishing the energy stores (ATP and creatine phosphate) depleted during anaerobic efforts.

Recap of Mitochondria

While mitochondria are not directly responsible for anaerobic metabolism, they work to resupply anaerobic exercise by ensuring efficient energy regeneration and muscle recovery.

The more mitochondria you have, the more ATP they can replenish for the ATP-PC system. And the more they can convert lactate into energy.

Unfortunately, you can only boost and improve mitochondria through aerobic training.

Ways to Train Aerobic Power and Capacity

Interval Training

Combine high-intensity intervals (anaerobic) with lower-intensity recovery periods (aerobic).

For example, alternate between sprints or high-intensity exercise periods of moderate aerobic activity, like jogging. Perform ten sprints. After each sprint, continue to jog for 3 minutes and sprint again. Mixing anaerobic and aerobic training will improve your repeat sprint ability, RSA. This helps train aerobic capacity.

Aerobic Power Threshold Training

On a spinning bike, load the intensity high so you are peddling slowly with the intensity. The training point you want to be at is just below the threshold of the muscle burn. If the muscle is burning, then you are training the lactate system.

Peddle for more than 5 minutes or your determined time. If needed, when and if you feel the burn, slowly diminish the intensity until the burning subsides, continue there, and repeat as needed. This will train aerobic threshold power.

After about 5 minutes, you can reduce the intensity for 2 minutes and then go back up again. Continue this for five sets of 5 minutes or whatever time you choose and can sustain.

Understand in the latter sets. Your time may increase time because aerobic adaptations happen fast. This helps train and develop more mitochondria.

HIIT- High-Intensity Intervals with Active Recovery

Perform high-intensity exercises like sprints or burpees, followed by active recovery exercises like jogging or jumping jacks. This combination challenges both energy systems.

Combination of Cardiovascular and Strength Training

Integrate strength training exercises with cardiovascular exercises in the same session. For example, perform a set of strength exercises (like squats or lunges) followed by a period of aerobic exercise such as rowing, running, or cycling for 3 minutes.

Multi-modal Training

Engage in activities that naturally involve both aerobic and anaerobic elements. For example, row hard for 1 minute and with no recovery cycle on the aerodyne bike for 3 minutes.

When planning a session that incorporates both aerobic power and capacity, it’s essential to consider factors such as intensity, duration, and the specific goals of your training. Additionally, be mindful of how your body responds to the combined stressors to avoid overtraining and allow for adequate recovery.

If you allow suitable recovery, your systems will adapt. If not, then your progress will be slow and limited.

Training is all about adaptation, the reason you don’t overtrain. Overtraining destroys the adaptation.

Important Final Words

A well-conditioned aerobic system experiences less overall fatigue, which allows you to dedicate more energy to explosive actions and high-power efforts during competition.

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