How Intervals Help

This might seem too obvious but it doe help to every once in a while the a look at why interval training helps us ride, run and/or swim longer and faster. Long Efforts, endurance pace: the big benefit here is muscle capillarization. We're expanded exiting and creating new capillary beds. More blood to the muscles means more oxygen also. these efforts also reduce muscle glycogen causing us to burn fat. Our muscles want to use glycogen so the body reacts to this by storing more glycogen thereby increasing endurance for future events. Your longest effort shouldn't account for more than a third of your total training time per week. LT Threshold Efforts: Increasing your threshold (whether you call it the lactate or acidosis) will allow you to run, bike or swim faster. The ability to perform right at the edge of going anaerobic (remember, we're never 100% in aerobic or anaerobic) is the key to going faster. We do essentially train our bodies to ride beyond the threshold HR. Those who can go beyond for longer efforts are using a bigger % of their engine and that is always good. These efforts may be 10-20 minutes in length and have 3-5 in a set. VO2 Max Efforts: Vo2 is the maximum rate that our muscles consume oxygen. Its the aerobic ceiling with your LT being the % of that ceiling that you can hold without giving in to the acidosis. You can improve this by increasing weekly training time as this will increase our muscles ability to use oxygen (our metabolic rate) but Vo2 intervals would be in that 1-5 minute range with 2-3 being the most common. Increase the size of your engine, even a little, and you have more to work with in all of your long and short events. Anaerobic capacity: The short efforts, 10-60 seconds, will increase muscle glycolic activity so that we can generate more ATP for faster muscle contraction and also improve that acidosis buffer. Once agin, if we think of aerobic and anaerobic efforts as being dimmer switches and not on/off switches we realize that we do use anaerobic glycolysis in all of our events at some point. Training this system will help when we need call on this. Think of that sprint to the finish in a time trial, climbing a hill in a road race, sprinting for the preem in a crit, etc. Your training should include all of these throughout the year depending on your events.