How long do you have to train 'liss' cardio before moving on..

I looked through the faq and didnt see anything about this.

Basically I've been doing Judo for a little while now plus weight training, my cardio isnt good but I'm not a bum who never gets any form of cardio at all. Anyway I wonder if I do liss how long before I can do interval type stuff. Or could I just go straight into fartlek training and build from there without the 40 minute type stuff?

Sorry if this has been covered already.

 

My understanding of it is that the anaerobic systems don't adapt well to long term development. You can do sprints and HIIT e.c.t. as much as you like, but the tabbata study showed that there were rapid gains for 6 weeks and then they stopped. This (I think) is because most (not all) anaerobic adaptations are in the CNS, not the muscles or heart so they adapt very quickly to full potential given enough stimulus.

The aerobic system on the other hand can develop for as long as you keep trying to develop it. The problem is fighters need a mix of both. I guess what you do depends on your training schedule, but in a perect world you would work on your aerobic system continually up untill a few months before a fight. From then you would work on threshold work, or medium intensity aerobic adaptions, and then in the last 8 weeks work on anaerobic adaptations. Then go back and start again. The problem is this kind of periodization is geared towards athletes with an off season to work it in. If your competing every weekend its not going to work.

Think of your LISS as kind of like the volume control on your computer. You can adjust the volume of itunes or the internet with the sliders, but you cant ever get them above the top of the slider. Your aerobic system is like the top of that slider. On its own it wont make anything louder (or you preform much better) but it then means you can raise your other attributes by working on them. I hope that makes sense.

The other way to look at it is to do LISS until your aerobic system is no longer a weak point.

 

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Thanks that was helpful.

I cant run regularly it bludgeons my knees, so most of the cardio I do will be on a rowing machine, the trouble with those is long distance stuff becomes difficult unless you lower the resistance to the bottom level. So for the safety of my knees I think I may run once a week 30/40 minutes and row once a week doing fartlek type training.

The more I try and learn about cardio improvment, the more I get confused and bewildered so I think I'm just gonna give it all a shot and see how it goes.

 

I find that even jogging is too high intensity for LISS type training, so I cycle. I worked up to 3 hour sessions last summer and its very easy on the joints. Another option is to run on the ball of your foot not your heel, that cleared up my shin splints/knee problems.

This is a pretty good article on the subject.
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/training/methods-of-endurance-training-part-1.html
Its heavy going, but explains it better than I can

 

After injury my physio told me my injury was probably to with my balance and partly to do with the fact I never step off the balls of my feet so I'll be sure to try that. Is twice a week enough to make improvements (on top of judo+weights)

 

It all depends on how advanced you are. To begin with yeah thats fine. As you advance you will need to do it for longer or more often or both to improve. Just like when weight training you need to increase the weight

 

Cheers for the help, I have acsess to a rowing machine and I've found a booklet for it that has progressive workouts beginners, intermediate and advanced I'l follow that twice a week and I'll see where it takes me.

 

Not sure if you accidentally a comma. Do you mean your sessions last 3 hours? How do you not die of boredom or starvation?

 

Yeah 3 hours or around that. I didn't get bored because I would be outside in the fresh air exploring new places. I would basically cycle somewhere I didnt know, and it would be an adventure finding my way home. I wasnt a fast cycler, but could cover about 25 miles so I wound up in pretty interesting places. I usually took a banana or three, or birthday cake once. My RHR dropped by about 8 BPM over the summer, although If I had done it 3 times a week im sure I would have seen more improvements. The biggest change was I lost quite abit of weight. LISS is great for fat loss apparently.

 

I guess if you have 3 hours to kill why not.

 

Im a student, so I have free time, especially over the summer, and it was enjoyable. Although in retrospect, I should have done it for less time, but more often. See at that stage my body didnt NEED 3 hour sessions to adapt, it only needed 1-1.5. By trying to rush the process its possible that in future anything less than that wont create the adaptions im looking for, so I may have inadvertently made it harder for myself. or not. Time will tell I guess

 

This. The changes bike commuting to and from work every day worked on me were huge. I stopped doing HIIT for a while when I started, and the drop in my HR was insane. I've been commuting for three years now. When i started my RHR was 82 consistently. YES, fucking 82.

Now it's 52.

 

Could you explain what you mean here? You may be keeping your stroke rate too high, or pulling too fast a split out of the gate, but for LISS on a rowing machine you should be keeping your split constant throughout. Its easy to get carried away and get into an anaerobic cardio workout in the first 2000 meters, then realize you are exhausted and have to slow down to a crawl for the next half hour. Stay disciplined and just put up with whatever split you can keep for the full length of your piece. For your purposes you could easily leave the resistance at 5 (you use a c2?) and leave it there forever.

Its also worth saying that the rowing stroke is as complicated as any lifting movement. So *especially when beginning* put as much focus on form while rowing as you normally do while lifting. LISS is a great time to find that place mentally to just sit and think about a fluid rowing motion for an hour. This is much more enjoyable on a tiny boat in the middle of a great river, but you take what you can get.

 

I think most reasonably active people might have the opposite experience. Jogging is a very good for LISS for most people, precisely because the intensity is so easy to control. You can slow down to a near walk (or even a walk) if necessary. Most fit humans have the ability to complete all stages of the run/walk continuum.

so I cycle[/QUOTE]

This isn't completely true, and is not a particularly positive way to think about your future training. You not only control the duration and frequency of the sessions, you control the intensity, and intensity is an extremely influential variable. As you improve your cardiac output, stroke volume, and recovery ability, and (probably) decrease your RHR, you will be able to increase the intensity of your LISS exercises.

Heart rate monitors are extremely helpful at managing intensity. But - this is personal opinion - one of the great things about many LISS exercises is that it is very easy to manually gauge and control intensity; once you've been doing something for a while, and feel able to increase the duration/frequency/intensity, it's probably fine to do so.

This is probably not the most effective or efficient way to go about it.

I wouldn't. More than likely, the "progressive workouts" contained therein are designed to improve rowing ability. You aren't rowing to improve your rowing ability; you are rowing to develop your energy systems. These often require very different training protocols.

 

C2 has daily workouts on their website.

 

Personally I like the exercise bike because I can read or play with my smartphone while I'm doing cardio. Makes it a lot less boring. It's also easy to control the resistance and speed. And it doesn't make my joints sore.

 

Incline treadmill walks are also very good from this perspective. You can put a tablet on the treadmill, watch an episode of a TV show which is going to be 42-50 minutes, just perfect for a LISS session. Wear an HR monitor, just tweak the incline or the speed to keep your HR in the zone.

 

On the main question- the FAQ gives good answers on when to move on from the initial "aerobic base" phase, but IIRC it doesn't cover the two related questions of whether you should periodically return to LISS work, and if you do return, if you should just be doing it (just trying to get your time with the right HR), or actively trying to develop it.

The aerobic system can produce a lot of energy- apparently, there are studies of competitive runners that show that for races of 400m or more, the aerobic system is the dominant provider of energy (IIRC for 400m races the aerobic system is providing just over half of the energy, and as the race gets longer the contribution is greater). Now it seems to be that people running in 400m races are generating a shit-tonne of energy. It therefore stands to reason that if trained, the aerobic system can produce 50% of one shit-tonne of energy- or maybe 500 metric shit-kilogrammes. I think we can all agree that this is plenty of energy. And the fact that is it the aerobic system that is producing that energy is pretty great, since in theory that level can be sustained for a long time without fatigue and negative side effects.

But of course it doesn't necessarily mean that fighters or other non-runners should train for that. Maybe the level of aerobic training required to develop your aerobic system to such a high-level is so high that you couldn't do all the other things you need to do. But maybe not: the "science of running" guy emphasizes the need for runners to progress their performance while doing aerobic base/off-season work, so at least he seems to think that you can continue to develop your aerobic capacity in the long term with periodic work, done just a few times a week. Maybe.

I don't have answers. I just have questions. (And also, seemingly, far too many socks compared to underpants. How did this situation arise?)

 

I've never seen such extensive calculations with shit-units.