Aerobic Training Cycle

Written by Yasar Shahzad Wednesday, 07 July 2010 20:38

Aerobic Training Cycle

Cycle Your Aerobic Training throughout the Year to Prevent Over-training and Adaptation

To avoid injury, over-training, loss of muscle and adaptation, your aerobic training should be cycled throughout the year based on your needs and goals at any given time. Doing aerobic training seven days a week month after month, year after year is unnecessary and will eventually lead to injury, over-training or burnout. It can also cause your body to adapt to the high volume of training. Aerobic adaptation almost always occurs if you continue doing daily cardio sessions for a long enough periods. As you become more and more, fit aerobically, the same workload becomes easier and eventually your body completely adapts to the workload. At this point, fat loss may come to a screeching halt. When it does, then the only way you can continue to lose fat is to add even more cardio. Before long, you may find yourself doing cardio twice a day just to maintain.

Aerobic adaptation syndrome often happens to aerobics instructors who teach two or three classes a day. Despite their extremely high energy expenditure, they sometimes have difficulty losing body fat because their bodies have grown so accustomed to the same routine every day.

To avoid adaptation and plateaus, you must alternate periods of high volume aerobic work with periods of low volume work over the course of a year. Bodybuilders do this naturally between pre-contest and off-season phases, and that's why they’re able to reach peaks of extremely low body fat every year. Once you’ve achieved what you consider an ideal weight and body fat percentage, don’t continue with six or seven days per week. Three or four times a week usually does the trick to maintain your body fat at your desired level. On the other hand, if you quit doing cardio completely, body fat will tend to creep back on.