VLa Max
By Aubrey Aldy
What side of the endurance physiology fence do you sit on? Most likely you’re a mix of both sides unless you’re an extreme outlier like marathoner Eliud Kipchoge or sprinter Usain Bolt for instance. The rest of us have a variety of fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers, fat oxidation rates and carbohydrate storage ability that land us somewhere in the middle. The problem is that we are not truly the average, which most training and scientific studies are based around. We fall somewhere on the graph, but almost certainly we are not in the exact center. If you want to maximize your potential in the 5k, 10k, marathon, you name it, you may not want to do what others are doing exactly. You would be better off knowing how to train as an individual and not simply training for a distance as though we are all robots simply needing to perform x amount in training to always get y in response.
Having an experienced coach can help an athlete fine tune their training, and the longer an athlete and coach work together the more insights will emerge into how to train most effectively. This doesn’t happen overnight and positive results can come from a number of contributing factors which make the process of understanding what truly works for you even more difficult. There are some ways to speed the process up, know if you’re on the right track, and find out if what you’re doing is working.
If two athletes run a 5k in the same time for example, they don’t get there with the exact same metabolism. One athlete may use a higher percentage of anaerobic energy metabolism than the other. When the race is lengthened the athlete using more anaerobic energy will have higher lactate levels at lower intensities, meaning faster burning of precious stored carbohydrate (glycogen), greater acidity in the blood, and will be forced to slow down sooner. These two athletes at shorter distances could look one in the same, so how could this be?! There are two measurements for rates of energy production that relate to this. The first is one everyone has heard before, the Vo2Max. This is the rate of energy production during exercise using oxygen to create fuel for the muscles. The Vo2Max will tell someone how much oxygen they can take in and how much of it they can use to create energy. The more important part in my opinion is the VlaMax. The VlaMax is the rate we create energy during exercise using anaerobic metabolism, without oxygen, using glycogen to create the energy for the working muscles. The Vo2Max and the VlaMax overlap though, so they don’t work in isolation. In other words, you can have a strong aerobic system, but if your anaerobic system dominates it you will be forced to slow down sooner than those with equal aerobic strength, but lower anaerobic involvement. I hope you’re still with me! An example of this is strength training. Lifting weights is an anaerobic activity, using primarily fast twitch muscle fibers and firing up the VlaMax. Don’t get me wrong, strength training is necessary, but how much and when matter. Peaking for a marathon, and you’ve had trouble with fueling or bonking? Maybe you’d be wise to limit the intensive training farther out from your race in favor or dialing in your race pace and metabolism. Not sure how to fuel properly and finish your race with positive energy stores? Having an idea of how many grams of carbohydrate you burn at race intensity, and how big your glycogen fuel tank is can help make this possible. In longer races this is more important than shorter races, but burning through glycogen at higher rates will create higher lactate levels and slow your race speeds in shorter races as well, even though running out of fuel isn’t an issue. On the opposite side, having a low VLaMax can mean you have trouble accessing your glycogen stores, limiting your overall energy availability, and lacking the ability to hit high speeds when you need to. Understanding where you are on the spectrum can be extremely helpful in dialing in the best training for you as an individual. As always feel free to reach out if you have any questions and I’d be happy to dig a little deeper into these topics for you.
Keep working hard, and recovering harder. I will look forward to seeing my GCR friends excelling in 2020.