Medical consultaion with your M.D. is recommended with any exercise program.
If you have an exercise discipline or athletic performance sport you actively participate in, you should pay very close attention to the energy system(s) that dominate your event. Those energy systems are; in order of how long they last, power produced on a per unit of time basis and when and if they are activated to dominate energy production the ATP-PC Adenosine Tri-Phosphate Phospho-Creatine system, the anaerobic glycolysis system (not always activated to energy production dominance) and the base aerobic energy system upon which all others and the animal kingdom of life to which we as humans belong, depends on. All of these systems interact in a very complex way, but we will keep it simple for this tip.
Most team sports involve powerful explosive bursts of energy on top of lower level intensities. So when you are striving for greater fitness for your sport, for example; using weight lifting, running, and plyometrics, to be a better competitor in soccer or basketball, you should seek to generate better aerobic capacity through the timing, duration and intensity of bursts in speed of repetitions and how long sets last, sprint times what percentage of absolute top speed you will reach, type of plyometric jumps and what time frame those jumps will occur in.
Many individual sports also have the need for varied energy expenditures, on a time unit basis, especially those lasting longer than 20 seconds. You read that correctly — 20 seconds. By 7-8 seconds of maximal effort, your body will have already begun to shift from the ATP-PC energy system into anaerobic glycolysis, this is what causes the intense burn and your muscles can feel like molten lead. Somewhere between 45-90 seconds this burning will reach a maximum. Events lasting this long are exceptionally difficult to train for, and require great mental discipline to overcome the “burn.”
Even paced efforts, during events lasting longer than about five minutes, are designed to mitigate that performance killing burn. One can train to increase tolerance of the “burn,” by repeating intervals in the TIME FRAME AND INTENSITY required to have the anaerobic glycolysis energy system dominate energy production.
No matter what combination of the ATP-PC and anaerobic glycolysis systems are used, all recovery from them is aerobic. So it is quite possible to get significant cardio vascular conditioning using compound weight lifting exercises done repetitively over a long enough time frame. There is no science or empirical athletic performance showing how the ATP-PC system or the anaerobic glycolytic system can be significantly improved by exclusively training in the aerobic system.
So your tip is to use the correct energy system(s) in your training AND the correct exercises to get the best satisfaction and results from your chosen sport or workout program.
Your Personal Trainer
Edward Troy