Energy Systems and Aerobic Foundation in Sports

how do you um think about conditioning structuring conditioning so we're looking at athletic performance do you look at from an energy system standpoint do you okay i've got to hit the lactic threshold air lactic like how do you think about that when you're setting up for it yeah so you so you've got to look at you got to look at it in different phases right so you know it depends what the sport is it depends on the needs of that sport right which is easy to look up in the literature and then you know then making some good judgment calls on what needs to be done first so for instance you can have someone who um is well conditioned but too anaerobically conditioned and not aerobically conditioned if i see this a lot especially with fighters where they can go for a long time but they're they're pushing themselves through they're exhausted they're not producing any power and then they feel horrible after their training when we look at we'll do like a cooper's test and some other things we can do a test and we find their vo2 maxes is not probably where it needs to be um we need to probably work on vo2 max and lactate threshold we need to be able to have them sustain a high level of conditioning and to be able to not just rely on the anaerobic side but also the aerobic side so when the aerobic reserve needs to be at a certain level the anaerobic reserve so that they can last all the rounds they need to while replicating continued punching power, kicking power, and things like that. So in that case, a lot of times we need to talk to a client that they need to go slower first. They need to rebuild that aerobic side of things because everything is built on that foundation of aerobics. So if you think about the saying in strength and conditioning is that strength is the mother of all qualities, right? So in order to build power and speed, reactive force, all that, you have to have a certain level of strength to then have everything on platform. So my contribution is aerobic is the mother quality of all conditioning. So you can be well but if you not well especially having a good aerobic base you can repeat that stuff often and you can recover from it well So we think about okay let create this really nice broad foundation of aerobic capacity And then from then now let work on your power endurance Let's work on the anaerobic side. If it's alactic, we understand too. If you think about an alactic sport, you look at fighting. Fighting is going to be massively alactic. You might have a one-two punch and then you back off a little bit. So you might have a two-second exchange. You kind of pace yourself, you back off a little bit, you might have five or six seconds before you go in again. So on paper that looks alactic, but if you repeat that over five minutes in a round, it becomes massively anaerobic, or massively lactic and massively aerobic as the round gets longer and as a 15 to 25 minute fight progresses, you get more and more dependent on that aerobic system, which is what a lot of people these days are told not to work on. So I feel it's a really good idea to create a good aerobic base okay then from there now shift everything into an anaerobic side whether that's lactic or alactic but pay respect to that aerobic side because that's what's supporting your anaerobic system and enabling you to recover between bouts of activity would it be possible to be able to i guess train all those different um energy systems in the same block or the same phase or would you recommend cool let's spend six to eight weeks aerobically and then let's transition? Or is it possible to do it all almost at once? Yeah, it depends on time, man. It depends on resources. How much time do you have? So it's probably, you can compartmentalize it and say, all right, here's what your metrics say. This is what your testing says. Maybe we work on six weeks of the aerobic side and then we start layering in some anaerobic stuff too. You can do that or you can just do it concurrently. The main thing is to think about this in dollars, right? Everybody understands money. I've got $100. How much of that am I going to invest in each thing that I need to work on? So I need to invest the bulk of it in the thing that's the worst. then any more more money on the skill specific uh and then on the anaerobics or whatever you need for whatever's dictated by your uh sport you spend a little bit more money on that and a little bit less on the other stuff but you still have to spend money on some of this stuff because you want to maintain that right um you see it all the time like if you watch like we watch a lot of ufc and you'll see someone who's very well conditioned. Maybe they don't punch that hard, but they can punch the same repeatedly and they never get tired, like the Diaz brothers. They never get tired. They're not really going to knock anybody out, but their game plan is to take punishment until they tire you out and then they try to get you on the ground, right? Then you look at somebody like a Conor McGregor who's a knockout artist. He does really well the first round. The second round you start seeing the mouth breathing. his hands are getting a little bit lower and they're not getting up fast enough by the third round he's completely shattered and he's just hanging on like somewhere somewhere in between that is kind of the key right if i can have endurance like nate diaz and if i can have the power and the reproducing that power over a long time like connor uh connor mcgregor i would have a really good uh a really good well-rounded combat athlete so it's like if they both had a kid together man that would be a hell of a hell of an mma guy i'd be kind of ugly kid but yeah that's kind of how you think about it and um you know there's a lot of testing like running a cooper's test and saying if we do a cooper's test we'll typically do a 12 minute test and what we want to track is what is the highest you can get your heart rate to so that's your maximal heart rate then we look at what's the average heart rate that you're actually able to sustain over that 12 minute period. When you divide the average heart rate by the maximal heart rate, that's going to give you a percentage. If it's low, then that means you're more anaerobically dominated in your energy system for your training. If it's high, then you're more aerobically. So if we think about a sweet spot being somewhere like the mid 80s, that would be a sweet spot where you can go on for a long time. So you got good aerobic fitness or endurance, but it's low enough to where you can maintain your power over the course of the sport that you're doing. If I move it too high on the aerobic side, I start losing power production at the expense of being able to go forever. If it's too low, I can produce a lot more power but I can't produce it often so I don't have the distance with it. So somewhere in the middle, if I can get them blended down, then that seems to be the best area for them to be if they want to perform at a high level for an extended period of time. So when we talk about high level sports and looking at I guess that variety of training different energy systems and different I guess looking at overall strength and condition when we talk about something like CrossFit So CrossFit obviously is very I guess sporadic in terms of their training and how they sort of structure it