If you every had an experience when joining the gym or hired a personal trainer, you may have asked the question "why do you want to get fit?". The question is not just to help you identify your fitness goals but to understand what you will be doing with those achieved fitness level. Little complicated? Well let's break it down.
Fitness is...
We all talk about fitness or being fit but do not really talk about what it means. Fitness is physical quality that leads to potential for performance. So, this can be strength, resting heart rate, VO2max or cardio, mobility and so on.
As a trainer, I often ask what would improving fitness can do for the trainees. Reason behind this is for me to understand what performance will the trainee planning on doing. For example, if the trainee has weaker lower back but wanting to hike with a sack, not only will we need to work on improving his cardio but will need to work on hip mobility along with lower back strength. We may also need to investigate other possibility to improve his performance. By achieving those goals, this person's potential for performing the hike with sack will be more efficient. Therefore, improving fitness level means improving the potential of performing physical events.
While improving fitness level, we also need to consider utilizing the potential that you have created through building your fitness level into actual performance, which is also known as conditioning. You may think that conditioning is only for athletes, but we all should work on conditioning.
Conditioning is...
It is quite common to see people with high level of fitness but have poor conditioning. For example, someone may have huge muscle mass but when it comes to playing basketball, they can be fast but cannot keep up for extended period of time.
Other possibility is the person may have very high cardio capacity where they can run 5-10 miles without any issues but when it comes to carrying grocery bag or lifting object like soil for the gardening they may only last for few minutes and start feeling exhaustion. Because the condition is low, compared with the size of muscles or cardio capacity that some people have, metabolic efficiency or ability to efficiently utilize energy and to recover from the physical stress can be low for the specific event.
Let us keep on using the hiking as an example to understand conditioning. During the actual hike, there are so many factors involved. You will have to step up, walk up and down the hills, carrying sack, stepping on uneven surface, and so on.
Also, between beginning of hike to the end of the hike the way our body use energy will be different. Initially we can use glycogen or glucose from food eaten prior to the hike but towards the end of the hike, you will be depleted and need to use storage called fat as energy source.
Because of this we cannot just simply lift weights or walking and running on the treadmill. We need to train the body to be able to use both food energy and stored energy. Able to use food and stored energy effectively is called metabolic flexibility and that is the prime purpose of conditioning.
How Does Conditioning Work?
Basic idea of conditioning is training your body with specific energy system. There are 3 energy systems in our body.
Alactic (ATP-CP) - Immediate: 10-12s
Lactic (Glycolytic) - Intermediate: 60-90s
Aerobic - Long term energy: hours
Conditioning work will be designed to work with intensity and duration of exercise(s), and duration of recovery that is specifically targeting the energy system.
For example, you can ride a stationary bike as fast as you can for 10-12 seconds and rest for 1-2 minutes so you can perform at the same on the 2nd and 3rd sets. This is working on Alactic energy system. You may push the sled or carry weights for 60-90s with equivalent duration of recovery, this would be working on lactic energy system. When you have several exercises and workout in a circuit format where you do certain number of repetitions or durations for 10-20 minutes or more without too much rest in between, this will be working on aerobic system.
Variation of conditioning design is limitless and can be creative to make it more challenging, fun and specifically designed for your goal. Will conditioning help improve the fitness level? Absolutely, however, by further improving your fitness level by increasing strength, mobility cardio, and so on, the conditioning can also improve. If you have strength, cardio, or mobility issues, you will need to solve them by improving them before starting the conditioning program. So if you have 60 minutes workout your training session should work on improving fitness level and then spending time on conditioning.
Our energy systems are like gears in cars, however, for us to be able to use the different gears we do need to train those energy system. Yet, when you train each energy system, your metabolic rate or how efficiently your body use energy, whether from food or body fat, will improve.
Kota Shimada
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