Brandon Pattison
WKR
What effect does this have?
What effect does this have?
I'll give it stab:
It creates an "afterburner" effect of Excess Post Exercise Oxygen Consumption.
This means that for the next 12-36 hours (depending on other factors such as your body type and conditioning level), your body is burning excess calories in a state of rest/recovery.
It can increase your V02 max, though most experts agree that your V02 max is largely determined by genetics, so most people can only improve their V02 max a limited amount, however, you can increase your anaerobic threshold (the point where you switch from aerobic to anaerobic) which has obvious performance benefits. You may also be able to increase the amount of time you can sustain an anaerobic state which also has obvious performance benefits.
Assuming you have an aerobic base, many people find that they can significantly increase the amount of time that they are able to perform aerobically by training anaerobically. In the simplest terms, you can call this using Interval Training to promote LSD performance. This discussion tends to create passionate debate amongst different camps. It does appear that anaerobic training is rather sport specific and not a substitute for skill work within that specific sport. In other words, don't do a bunch of hard sprint intervals and necessarily expect to be able to reasonably swim aerobically for 5 miles. Likewise, doing anaerobic swimming sprints does not necessarily translate directly into increased performance in a 5k.
In my opinion, Anaerobic training can be deceiving because it is so short. It requires more recovery time than is often obvious to the athlete. As a result, mixing significant quantities of anaerobic and aerobic training is not productive for many people because they are doing aerobic exercise while still in a state of recovery from the anaerobic training. That's just my opinion, though and can be the subject of much debate, bro science, know it alls, and people with better than average genetics who also have strong opinions based on empiricism. its best to cross referance from neutral sources and experiment on your own.
I didn't say that anaerobic training does not effect your aerobic capacity. I said that it does (but not everyone agrees on that). The main point there, as I understand it, it that your VO2 max tends to be sport specific.
I personally have found great results using interval training.