How EXACTLY do I get better at running long distance, swimming, general endurance cardio, etc?
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Here is what worked for me a decade(ish) ago when I took my five-mile run time from 38 minutes to 30 minutes in about 9 months:
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don’t overtrain; workout no more than 5 times a week and have at least 2 pure rest days
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A majority of your workouts should be 400 to 800m intervals with at least 1:1 work-rest ratio
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Don’t neglect skill work
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your distance work should alternate between paced medium runs and long meandering jogs
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every once in a while, replace a long run with a long bike ride if you’re sore
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do some lower and upper body strength work, especially calves and tibialis
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I think there is generally an excessive prejudice against cardiovascular exercise by some followers of Ray's work. As long as you're eating a surplus of calories, avoiding PUFA, and re-carbing after or during your workouts you will be far better off doing low intensity cardio than not.
The overwhelming majority of examples given in which 'cardio' causes bad outcomes are cases of people pushing beyond a zone 2 HR threshold for the majority of their training and eating inadequately. You should be capable of maximal force production, you should be capable of hill sprints, and you should be capable of moving great distances on foot- anything less is laziness and life-denying.
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I like hiking in the forest hunting for mushrooms lots of fun.
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I am a collegiate endurance athlete. I love my sport and I think peating should open doors and allow you to do what you enjoy, not close them.
Do lots and lots and lots of low effort endurance exercise, and crosstrain liberally. I am a rower and most of the year probably spend more time biking and skiing than I do actually rowing.
Low effort work will increase your work capacity and aerobic base, allowing you to recover from efforts faster, and do more efforts. I typically spend 14 hours a week doing easy cardio (zone 2) and never finish a workout feeling fatigued, stressed, serotnogenic, cortisolic etc. Eating peaty snacks while working out keeps you out of fatty acid oxidation and away from producing stress hormones.
If all you want to do is improve endurance and work capacity just spend as much time as you want to doing very easy cardio. It will improve climbing as you will recover faster, both between spurts of effort while climbing, or after the climb when you are resting.
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Endurance sports training requires you to practice it as much as possible. I don't train that way but the primary difference between high-intensity and low-intensity is the recovery time needed. Ignore the fat grifter having closeted-homosexual fantasies about you, everyone has different goals.
If you're running all the time, get some really engineered shoes because pavement is not natural so that naturalist grift shoes are a bad idea. No-drop, barefoot ect. If you had a beach to run on then it would be a different story but most people don't have that.
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@Lovesickhs18 the Norwegians have developed a training plan based on lactic acid production. instead of running x miles or y minutes, they measure lactic acid and when it rises they stop. everything after that point is harming you.
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@boats Whoa that's awesome, do you have any more info about this? How do you test lactic acid buildup?
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@grymsky90210
see here: https://www.mariusbakken.com/the-norwegian-model.htmlI'd also consider drinking baking soda before cardio. and running with your mouth closed. and taking ample recovery time.
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@donovan How do you minimize the damage in muay thai? I have been doing it for 3 months from now although i still get hit in the head from time to time. I would be grateful if you shared your knowledge on this topic.
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@Brute i am going to make a thread within the next few days, i will tag you in it when i do. But first a few things you can start immediately, neck training, and things that exercise the brain heavily (puzzles, chess, sudoku, word search, juggling, etc)
Edit: also, avoid headgear. It will make it harder to notice hard hits to the head, rather than acknowledge them and stop for the day (i.e. you get rocked while wearing headgear but the headgear blunts the pain so you don’t realize how hard you’ve been rocked) -
@donovan Tag me too I'm doing MT as well. lol
