4618 Endurance and Stamina FTW!
Heavy Day//
Deadlift 3-3-3-3-3 and 3 accessory exercises that will make you glad it's the weekend!
Well now that I see the programming, maybe yesterday's blog post would have been better suited for today and today's blog for yesterday's WOD... whatever.
Cardio respiratory endurance refers to how efficiently you can utilize (collect, deliver, and sustain) the oxygen you breathe. Do you need to breathe? Yes? Ok then cardio endurance is pretty important. And Cardio endurance refers to really any sustained effort but is specific to Oxygen. Stamina is really similar. Your efficiency in utilizing (collecting, delivering, and sustaining) energy. Stamina looks like endurance because it looks like and is tested by long lasting efforts, but energy can come from stored ATP (very fast), Glycogen (carb stored in the muscles, medium length efforts), fat+oxygen (very, very long and slow efforts).
Many of you, when I talk about endurance, the person who comes to mind might be the pencil thin marathoner. And again, you've really got to wipe the slate clean. The people searching for a sub 2 hour marathon are a very specialized type of athlete. Avoiding increasing your endurance is really limiting your overall fitness. About half of you despise running, rowing, or any WOD that goes north of 15 minutes, but we can't have an honest conversation about your fitness without talking about your ability to run.
Cardio endurance contributes to your fitness in many ways other than just breathing good in a workout.
- Intense exercise or the energy pathway that uses glycogen (carbs) is expensive, the cost is fatigue. Simply put, high intensity builds fatigue, low intensity can serve to clear that fatigue. The higher our cardio respiratory capacity, the better we’ll be at clearing fatigue while atp and glycogen replenish.
- Cardio respiratory endurance can be thought of like the base of a pyramid. We can get strong through resistance training, but we can do far more work and much quicker with a solid aerobic base. Without the ability to breathe and replenish energy stores, we’re really limited on the amount of work we can do and the speed at which we do it. A lot of people would say strength is the base of the pyramid, but they really work in conjunction and not against each other.
A really fun thing about CrossFit is that we increase your cardio endurance many ways. Yes running 5k’s is a great way to do it, but there are many other ways as well. Running days are just as important as heavy days and MetCon days!