Your Aerobic Capacity is the foundation to your house

What is your aerobic capacity?

Aerobic capacity is how efficiently your body can get oxygen to working muscles and as along as oxygen can get to your muscles you can keep using them…. your aerobic capacity is the engine your body works from during anything from daily exercise to your race day performance and is commonly known as a base. The stronger your base the more time your body can withstand moving lower and higher intensities. in short the bigger your base, the longer you can perform.

A strong base prevents you from peaking too early in your sessions or your races by ensuring oxygen can get to your working muscles preventing fatigue and the build up of lactate (cramp).

Have you noticed them people in the gym or on race day that can keep working just as hard or even harder towards the end?

The people who have negative running splits through a long run?

The people who are still running the same pace 1kms at the end of a hyrox?

or the crazy people who can bust out 100 unbroken wall balls at the end?

Now obviously theres so many factors that play into the capability of this but one of the biggest in my opinion will always be their big base, their huge aerobic capacity.

so how do you become one of these people?

The famous zone 2 work is where all the magic happens and i know zone 2 gets thrown around everywhere in the fitness space but i still think its massively under respected, under rated and under used. I don’t use many absolutes in fitness but one thing i can absolutely say is that every single elite athlete does large portions of their training in zone 2. zone 2 is that ‘easy run’, ‘steady state work’ or even better ‘conversational pace’ wether it be running, cycling, rowing or swimming although i would not recommend a conversation while swimming!