Benefits of Cardio Sessions
At The Project PT, we have always emphasised the importance of our Strength Class. But today, let's talk about its perfect complement: our Cardio Class. With our Magdalen Road expansion on the horizon, it's the ideal time to explore how cardio benefits both body and mind.
Understanding Cardio
'Cardio' comes from the Greek word 'kardia', meaning 'heart'. When we engage in cardiovascular training, we essentially train our heart and blood vessels to supply the entire body more efficiently. In short, we're promoting heart health.
While strength training offers numerous benefits for longevity, brain development, and psychological well-being, it may have limitations regarding heart health. In fact, at its extreme, particular adaptations from strength training might even hinder cardiovascular health. This is why we consider adding cardiovascular exercise to your weekly schedule a real winner.
The Essence of Cardio: Endurance
The primary focus of cardio sessions is to improve endurance. Endurance is a multifaceted concept, often context-specific. You might need it for a weekend park run, to keep up with your kids while they play in the playground, or to spend all Sunday planting in the garden. It's about improving your ability to keep working without easily fatiguing.
Heart rate is a good indicator of how hard you work, which is why many endurance athletes wear heart rate monitors during training. Like strength training, cardio sessions have variables, including work-to-rest ratios and intensity, that can be modified to achieve specific adaptations. When we program our cardio sessions at The Project PT, we consider these variables, ensuring that we not only hit one aspect of endurance but many.
Not Just Treadmills
When most people think of cardiovascular training, they picture machines like treadmills, rowers, and spin bikes. However, any exercise can be cardio if the correct variables are considered.
Take squats, for example:
Heavy weight, low reps: You might be out of breath with a high heart rate, but it won't be sustained.
Bodyweight or lightweight for an extended period: Your heart rate will increase and stay elevated, challenging your endurance.
As you perform a movement continuously, you'll start to fatigue. Your ability to keep going depends on how efficiently you can supply oxygen to your working muscles and expel CO2. With consistent practice, you'll adapt and improve, becoming better at managing fatigue.
How Cardio Classes Help with Strength Training
While many view cardio and strength training as separate entities, they complement each other in surprising ways. One often overlooked benefit of cardio training is its ability to enhance recovery between strength training sets. By improving your cardiovascular fitness, you're training your body to clear metabolic byproducts more efficiently and deliver oxygen to your muscles faster. This means that after a heavy set of squats or deadlifts, your improved cardiovascular system helps you recover more quickly, preparing you for your next set with less fatigue. Over time, this improved inter-set recovery can lead to more productive strength training sessions, allowing you to maintain higher quality reps throughout your workout.
The Project PT Welcomes a Sled
As you may be aware, our Magdalen Road expansion is just around the corner, both in time and distance. The larger space not only allows us more freedom in programming but also enables us to introduce new pieces of equipment. One such piece is an exercise sled.
A sled is a tool that complements both strength and cardiovascular training. It's essentially a trolley that you push, with the added benefit of being able to add additional weight, which in turn can change the intensity.
Before we delve into how we might use the sled to hit different aspects of cardio training, it's worth mentioning another benefit and how it complements the strength training classes. At The Project PT, we love running; we even have a running club. But you might notice that if you increase your running miles, there's going to be a trade-off in the amount of weight you can lift for your lower body movements.
You might ask yourself, "Why is that?" One of the reasons has to do with a mechanical property of muscle. When your foot hits the ground while running, you have to account for the ground reaction forces going up through your leg. These forces act to bend your knee, and if the muscles (mainly your quadriceps) did not counteract these forces, you would find yourself falling over constantly.
These muscle actions are called eccentric because your muscle is creating force while it is lengthening. While eccentric muscle actions are the best way to build strength and size, they can be incredibly fatiguing and are most likely the cause of delayed onset muscle soreness you might have experienced after a session.
So while running is fantastic, these eccentric muscle actions can sometimes hinder your strength sessions. This is where the sled comes in. The sled positions your body in such a way that many of the same forces that occur during running are somewhat mitigated, and most of the muscle actions are concentric (meaning the muscle is shortening). This helps with the fatiguing nature of eccentric muscle actions and means that there may not be as much of an interference effect from the sled.
Programming Cardio with a Sled
The coach often considers three variables when programming cardio sessions: time, intensity, and intent. These variables are not mutually exclusive and will interact with each other most of the time, but we will discuss them separately using the sled for programming examples.
Time
Time is often determined by the adaptation you try to achieve during your cardio sessions. For simplicity's sake, cardio training elicits two different adaptations: aerobic (with oxygen present) and anaerobic (without oxygen present).
Let's consider three scenarios with a moderately loaded sled:
Short Sprint (8 seconds): The coach tells you to sprint as fast as you can with the sled from one side of the room to the other. Once you achieve this goal, you notice you're gasping for breath. This time and intensity likely made this activity anaerobic, as you did not have adequate time to supply the working muscles with oxygen. They most likely relied on substances already in the muscles to help replenish molecules that help us work.
Medium Duration (2 minutes): We'll do the same activity, but this time it takes us 2 minutes to complete a few laps of the room. We'll add the intent component: the coach tells you to complete a certain number of laps within 2 minutes, ensuring intensity remains high throughout. Once again, the first eight to ten seconds will be fueled by substances within the muscles, but after that time, these substances will not replenish, so you'll need another energy system. We still have limited oxygen present due to the nature of the activity, but some is available. Your body will use other substances that are not as fast-acting as the previous ones but can be sustained longer.
Longer Duration (10 minutes): For the final task, the coach tells you to push a moderately loaded sled for ten minutes. You'll find that you cannot sustain a high-intensity output for this time, or you'll need to stop. So, your intensity is moderate, which means that the muscles are supplied with adequate oxygen for the task at hand.
It's worth pointing out again that these variables are not mutually exclusive. At The Project PT, we program in a way that naturally helps obtain the specific adaptation we want. If the coach told you to work for 2 minutes but did not give a specific intensity (dictated by speed, wattage, and weight), then you might just cruise through the two minutes, which would be at odds with what we were trying to achieve for that exercise. On the other hand, if the coach gave you an AMRAP (As Many Rounds As Possible) for ten minutes but did not give adequate rest time or instructions on how to pace yourself, you might go out too hard at the beginning and not make it to the end of the ten minutes, which again does not lend itself to the adaptation we were trying to achieve.
By carefully considering time, intensity, and intent, we can create cardio workouts that target specific adaptations and complement your overall fitness goals. Whether you're looking to improve your endurance, boost your strength training performance, or simply enjoy the versatility of our new sled, our Cardio Class at The Project PT has something for everyone. We look forward to seeing you at our expanded Magdalen Road location, and hopefully, you will love the sled as much as we do.
