Damect Dominguez
June 28, 2024
4 Strategies to Enhance Your Endurance
Endurance is a cornerstone of athletic performance, whether you're a runner, cyclist, swimmer, or participate in any sport that demands sustained effort like CrossFit. Building endurance is not just about putting in the miles or completing one high-intensity workout after the other; it requires a strategic approach that encompasses various training principles. By understanding and applying these principles, you can enhance your endurance and maximize your fitness level.
Principle #1: Build A Solid Base
Building an endurance base refers to the initial phase of an endurance training program where the primary focus is on developing a solid aerobic foundation. This phase is crucial for athletes in any endurance sport–including CrossFit. We are seeing more and more high-level Games athletes take several weeks at the beginning of the season to focus on just this.
In the TD Endurance Bundle, you’ll start you’re first 8 weeks with base training (Engine Builder Base).
Engine Builder Base follows these 4 principles:
- Lots of Low to Moderate Intensity Training: The majority of the workouts are performed at a low to moderate intensity. This means keeping the heart rate in the aerobic zone, which is typically 60-75% of your maximum heart rate. The aim is to improve the body's ability to use oxygen efficiently.
- Gradually Increased Volume: The training volume, or the total amount of time spent exercising, is gradually increased. This helps to build muscular endurance and improve cardiovascular efficiency.
- Consistent and Gradual Progression: Consistency is key. Workouts should be regular, and the progression should be gradual to avoid injury and overtraining.
- Variety in Training: Including different types of workouts such as long slow distance (LSD) runs/rides, tempo runs, and cross-training can help to build endurance while keeping the training interesting and balanced.
Principle #2: Build On Your Base
After the base phase of training, athletes can move into more specific and intense phases to build upon the foundation they have established in weeks 1-8.
After the Engine Builder Base program, we’ll move straight into the TD Engine Builder program. This program follows many of the same principles listed above. However, intensity and volume are both much higher.
Increased Intensity: Increase the frequency and intensity of workouts such as tempo runs and interval training. These workouts help improve your lactate threshold and VO2 max.
Threshold Training: Focus on workouts that sustain efforts just below or at your lactate threshold. This helps improve your ability to sustain a higher pace for longer periods.
VO2 Max Workouts: Incorporate sessions that push you to your maximum oxygen uptake level, typically involving short, intense intervals with longer recovery periods.
Principle #3: Properly Incorporate Recovery Periods in Your Training
Each program in the Training Day Endurance Bundle follows a systematic approach to training. Each week or block of training builds on the next. Most of the programs follow a 3-4 week build period where volume and intensity gradually increase followed by a 1-week deload where both volume and intensity are reduced.
As you can see below, deload weeks are also suggested between the end and start of certain programs.
Deload weeks offer several benefits including:
Preventing overtraining, injury prevention, mental refreshment, performance improvement, and other several important physiological benefits. Let’s discuss two of them below:
Performance Improvement
- Supercompensation: The body can supercompensate during rest periods, leading to improvements in strength, endurance, and performance when training resumes.
- Freshness for Key Workouts: Deload weeks ensure that athletes are fresh and ready for subsequent high-intensity training blocks, allowing them to perform better in key workouts and races.
Physiological Benefits
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Glycogen Replenishment: Reduced training volume allows glycogen stores to replenish, which is essential for maintaining energy levels during high-intensity workouts.
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Hormonal Balance: Deloading helps regulate hormones such as cortisol, which can become imbalanced with excessive training stress.
Principle #4: Specificity of Training
Specificity in endurance training refers to the principle that training should be tailored to the specific demands of the sport or activity you are preparing for. The concept of specificity dictates that the exercises and workouts you do should closely mimic the movements, energy systems, and conditions of your target event or goal.
Since most of these programs are tailored toward the functional fitness athlete, we use the air bike, rower, skierg, and running to train our endurance.
The second half of the TD Endurance Bundle includes two programs that train only one domain–Dominate the Row and CrossFit to Half Marathon.
Overall, more than half of the 50 weeks of training included in this bundle incorporate all of the tools listed above (bike, row, ski, run). However, just under 20 weeks are dedicated to what I believe are the critical parts of endurance training for the functional fitness athlete.
The rower is included because it is a very technical tool that requires consistent training in order to master it. Running is included because it is the one training domain that has the most overlap over the others.
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