The Bigger Your Aerobic Engine Is, The Better Your Anaerobic Performance

Have you been so tired that your legs are wobbly, heavy and just can’t move like how you instruct them? Your movements are so slow that your opponent can beat you so easily.

You might be a stronger, faster, powerful, & talented athlete than your opponent but all those are useless if you are out of breath after a few minutes of playing your sport. What good is your strength if you can’t use it? 

You can’t dribble the ball, you can’t shoot it accurately, you can’t reach for the drop shot, heck, you can’t even think properly to make any right decision right now. If you experience these before, then you need to focus on building your aerobic engine.

Let me explain why focusing on your aerobic can significantly improve your sport performance. 

Aerobic endurance is like tank fuel. Smaller tank fuel can’t get you far. You need to stop frequently and fill the fuel. Bigger tank fuel can sustain you all the way. You can go fast, you can go slow, and you still have the fuel to last the entire journey, in our case, the entire game.

Improvements that you can get from doing aerobic or endurance training are abundant. Here are some example:

• Big aerobic engine means bigger heart thus bigger contraction (bigger left ventricles) to pump oxygen throughout your body. 

• Increased capillarisation in the muscle: more blood can be supplied to your muscle (now you can repeatedly do your skill without fatigue easily)

• Increased in mitochondrial number and density (more energy can be produced)

• Increased enzymes that are involved in energy production. Also means can have efficient energy and buffer acidosis, in another word, it’s hard for you to get tired

Those are some of the benefits of aerobic training. Next is how can include in your training program to improve your sport performance

Step 1: Put everything else in maintenance and focus one aerobic focused block

• Do test for your aerobic fitness (either 2.4km, or bleep test, or YoYo test, up to you)

• For your gym session, cut in half in terms of volume (e.g. instead of 4x a week of gym, maybe go 2x/week, 4 sets of squat to 2 sets of squat)

• Don’t worry about losing gains on that, you can maintain your muscle and strength even with half of the volume as long as the intensity is maintained

Step 2: Do 2-4 weeks of aerobic work

• Add 2-3 sessions of slow steady state cardio/week for 30-60 minutes/session

• Your heart rate should be within 130-150 beats per minute (bpm)

Step 3: Do 1-2x of interval training for 2-4 weeks

• Cut down slow steady state cardio for 1-2x/week 

• Do 1-2x of interval training. 

• Try to mimic your sport but at lower intensity

• For example, use 30:30 work:rest ratio. Meaning do 30s run, then 30s rest for 5-10 sets. 

• When in doubt, start slow and easy. Progress each week

• You can do 60:60, or 30:60 or 10:20. The variations are limitless

Step 4: Have a deload week

• Cut everything in half in terms of volume

• This is to dissipate fatigue and to achieve supercompensation effect

• 1x of slow steady state, 1x for interval training, 1x weight session

• Rest for 3-4 days before re-test your aerobic fitness

• See improvements in your fitness!

Step 5: How to move on from here

• You can repeat the process

• Or you can go back to your previous program but now put your new found aerobic fitness improvement as maintenance. 

• Maybe 1-2x a week of slow steady state cardio, and 1-2x a week of interval

Step 6: DOMINATE YOUR SPORT

In upcoming articles, I will write more about endurance and the methods that we can use to improve our endurance capacity. If you have any specific questions, do let me know.