Day 5 – Anaerobic conditioning and battling muscle fatigue

After working out in the aerobic zone for a few weeks, you’re feeling pretty good. You’re able to go longer, breathe easier, and you have more energy throughout the day. Things are going so well. Why in heaven’s name should you work harder?

Anaerobic conditioning will remove you from your comfort zone, will hurt and will make you second guess about working out at all, but, it is a necessity to move forward, get stronger and increase vitality. That lean, trim, strong, muscularly defined body you admire on the tube did not come without work and sacrifice. It did not come from a minimal effort. This level of fitness is produced by making fitness a job, not just an activity; and a job that makes you work harder the more you work at it. Greg LeMond threw out a famous quote that I like to refer to regularly, “It does not get easier, you just go faster.” This sums it up well. The more you work harder, the more you want to work even harder.

But, getting started is the hardest part. You must redefine your limits and must constantly push at those limits. Anaerobic workouts will test you and are designed to remove you from your comfort zone and condition you to build muscle, power, longevity, endurance, confidence and a work ethic unmatched by most people. With this, you are pushed more and more to the right of the bell curve that defines the average fitness of our culture. Each effort you put in makes you more unique and should inspire you to feel proud of your accomplishments. So, how do we approach this? Let’s break this down.

As we have discussed before, our heart rate as a percent of max, defines the zone we’re working in. Between 60-69%, is the fat burn zone. 70-79% aerobic zone. 80-89% is the anaerobic zone and above 90% is the red zone. Now, these zones are generalizations of how most people respond to efforts. It is important to specify that each person is unique and may not fall exactly into each zone as prescribed. What is the anaerobic zone? This is a zone of effort that transitions from 100% aerobic production to 100% anaerobic. Confused? Yea, I was too. When you are exercising in your aerobic zone you are utilizing exclusively oxygen and water to fuel cells for the production of energy. As long as there is air and water, body fat and fuel, you can pretty much go forever in this zone. Alternatively, when at 100% anaerobic production, your cells no longer utilize oxygen and water, they use exclusively a compound called adenosphine triposphate (ATP). When efforts become higher, our body begins to produce ATP in order to supply the muscles with a fuel that is quickly and easily utilized to produce power. Think of a fuel that is highly combustible versus one that burns slowly. For example, a Duraflame log versus paper soaked in gasoline. If you need to produce lots of energy quickly, you throw the paper on the fire. You might singe your eyebrows off, it will be hot quickly and over quickly as well. ATP is similar. At higher efforts, your body will reach a level where the Duraflame log (Oxygen) just can’t do the job any longer to produce the power you are requiring and must start producing ATP to supplement oxygen supply. Once ATP production has begun, you have entered into the anaerobic zone (~80% max heart rate). As you continue to increase your efforts, your cells require more and more ATP for power and the balance between oxygen and ATP shits requiring more ATP and less oxygen.

At about 90%-95% percent of maximum effort, we hit what is called a threshold intensity (TI).Within this small window of effort is a limit called the VO2max. This limit is defined by 100% ATP consumption for power. When we hit this, we don’t have much time left before our bodies give out and we are forced to rest and recover. However, as long as we are below the TI, we can keep cranking and producing power. Many athletes dabble in the TI zone constantly walking the fine line to generate the most power and the most speed, this is especially important for time trials and triathlons where there is no rest from a draft and no one to beat, but yourself. Many times the TI zone is simply included within the red zone (90-100%max) umbrella.

Lactic acid (LA) is the waste by product of ATP that is produced by your cells and dumped directly into your blood stream. LA changes the ph of your blood making it more acidic. But, this alone is not what hurts when you “feel the burn.” The burn is actually a result of torn muscle tissue that occurs when working at greater intensities. LA is known to irritate the torn muscle tissue further, however the bulk of the pain that you feel is as a result of the actual muscle damage. We’ll go into this further during the next segment of this discussion.
Usually once at VO2max, your ride will feel really painful to the point where you will feel extremely vulnerable and begin questioning your ability to finish the ride or win the race. It’s important to understand that while it is possible to recover some of your strength from resting into the aerobic zone, you will probably never feel as strong as if you had never hit your VO2max in the first place.

So, why train like this? Are we all masochists? To some degree, yes, endurance athletes are masochists. But, there is something more that drives us. From the desire to escape reality to the need for personal accomplishment, many factors of our personality and life experiences build to our subjugation of bodily pain. I should also note that as an endurance athlete, your pain threshold will increase with training. To our disadvantage, sometimes we forget to train at lower intensities as we begin to seek the pain threshold in order to feel like we worked out. Even the most experienced riders and racers must recover. Without recovery, anaerobic and red zone training will not improve strength. As a matter of fact, recovery should be prioritized over anaerobic training. However, and most simply put, anaerobic training is the only way to build strength and increase muscle mass.

Increased muscle size is critical for power and endurance. In addition, increased muscle help increase metabolic rates keeping us slim, trim and healthy.
In addition to muscle, anaerobic training improves our aerobic conditioning. As we continue to seek our VO2max and exceed it, we push our VO2max higher and higher allowing our bodies to become more efficient in the aerobic zone. Our hearts build strength and can push a greater volume of blood over a given time. Our lungs expand larger to absorb greater volumes of air fueling our cells with oxygen. As we push our VO2max up we can work more comfortably at higher efforts, go longer and further helping to accomplish our fitness goals. Not only are we able to increase our VO2max, we also train ourselves to increase our max heart rate.

How should we train our anaerobic zone? While there are many strategies including threshold intensity training, intervals, peak training and more, I’d like to encourage you to simply seek it and train in it. The videos that are under the Anaerobic training category allow you to ride and have fun while dipping into and out of the anaerobic zone maintaining an average heart rate of about 80-85% of your max. These will ask you to go into the red zone from time to time, but do not look to train you at TI’s. These are a good way to begin building strength and get you used to anaerobic intensities.