How Do We Build Our Aerobic Base?

As I mentioned earlier, building our aerobic base is critical, not only for our health but also to our sport performance. Being unfit means having a bad aerobic base. All your skills and talents are wasted and not useful at all if you are catching your breath all the time.

Surely we experience this in our sport before where there are times when we know the move or decision to make during the game but our body just won’t listen. We know we should go to the left but our legs are so beat up, it can’t move anymore. This shows how important being aerobically fit is.

If we have to start from the beginning, then we should start with low intensity steady state (LISS) cardio or also known as extensive endurance. The intensity for this training is so low you can do it daily (although you don’t have to because you still have other training that you have to commit)

Below are the five steps to improve your base aerobic endurance:

Step 1: Dedicate 1-2 months for aerobic base phase

• That means everything else need to be in maintenance (your weight session etc)

• Block out these two months dedicate to improve your aerobic base

• Don't be tempted to improve every physical quality at once. You will burn out.

Step 2: Plan your FITT (frequency, intensity, time, type)

• Frequency: dedicate 3-9 sessions of LISS per week (this includes your sports training, if you train your sport 6 days/week then I recommend only 3 sessions of LISS/week)

• Intensity: 130-150 beats/minute. You should be able to hold conversation while doing it

• Time (duration): 20-60 minutes

• Type (modality): you can choose jogging, cycling, rowing or any cardio equipment of your choice. Although you need to remember, be careful of repetitive pressure on your joints (if you play football, then adding cycling or swimming could be a better choice as it doesn’t put too much stress to your knees)

Step 3: Progress your training

• If you start 20 minutes of cycling for 3 sessions/week, then increase to 25 minutes for the second week. Keep increasing every week

Step 4: Plan your deload week

• We will accumulate both fitness and fatigue when we train. To see our gains, we have to remove the fatigue.

• That’s where deload week comes in. Have it every 4th week

• You can cut half the volume down (e.g. if you do 4 times/week, then cut it to 2 times/week)

Step 5: Progress to higher intensity endurance method

• By 2 months, you should improve your aerobic base, now we can include higher intensity endurance training method

• For this part, I will cover in the next article, so stay tune

#endurancetraining #steadystatecardio #LISS # aerobicbase