How to turn a Strength Athlete into a Hybrid Athlete. Part 4 of 5.

Part 4: Build more resilient Respiratory and Oxygen delivery coordination…

Strength athletes have a great ability to perform exercise whilst also bracing their diaphragm. This also means that they sometimes need to rethink the way they train, especially if you have a powerlifter who is getting into more tactical/CrossFit/Hyrox type events. You aren’t going to last very long if you hold your breath for a whole set of thrusters. This tends to mean that there is potentially a false representation of a lack of fitness, when in reality, there is a disconnect between what the athlete ‘thinks’ is correct based on a lifetime of training, and what is optimal for a change in disciplines. The first port of call on this is getting better - quite literally - at breathing, and looking a bit more in depth at whether there are any inspiratory or expiratory issues or limitations.

Oxygen is king for exercise performance - the uptake, delivery of and usage. These are the three areas that may present themselves as limiters for the athlete (and determining which one is the main bioenergetic limiter for your athlete, can be a breakthrough moment). It’s worth noting though that athletes don’t fail because of their limiter - they fail when all of the compensators that they have built up to mask that limitation fail.

For strength athletes, I often see a situation where they have poor respiratory uptake and a delivery limitation that are sometimes intertwined due to their training history.

This is why starting with Zone 2 and Threshold can be useful, because it doesn’t completely overload these systems because the athlete can continue to breathe well and there is enough delivery of oxygen to sustain steady state and high aerobic (threshold) training.

But what happens if we want to create a situation where we do challenge the uptake of oxygen as well as the delivery of it? The answer is to design and create intervals (whether running based or metcon based) where the demand for oxygen starts to outstrip the available supply. In essence, you “desaturate” your athlete of oxygen by using a set of intervals that progress within the interval to a level that becomes unsustainable, followed by complete rest. These could look like track or treadmill intervals that have a gradual but sustained increase in running speed throughout, or extended hill intervals, bike/ski-erg/row intervals, depending on their particular needs (but likely to last between 2 - 6 minutes per interval).

This kind of training shouldn’t really be done more than once a week - it’s hard physically and mentally! It’s worth noting that you can also train the resupply of oxygen to your athlete by flipping this interval structure to a “hard start” interval by making them overextend themselves and desaturate the first half, whilst then settling into a more sustainable pace for the latter half. This trains the resupply of oxygen to to the muscle mass but also provides a slightly less intense and therefore more recoverable set of intervals than full desaturation intervals, whilst providing similar VO2 outcomes to standard intervals.

As ever, if you’re enjoying this mini series and you want to go through my master class of putting everything you’ve read so far into practise, drop me a message about coaching on the 1:1 coaching page.