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Re: What happens to your threshold HR when fitness improves? [NiceTriCoaching]
NiceTriCoaching wrote:
My examples of my athletes having improved their aerobic capacity all year with "Training Load X" then showing a decrease when using "Training Load Y" doesn't prove that their
aerobic capacity shrank when switching to "Training Load Y"?

Proof versus causality? I'm not trying to prove anything, I'm just stating what has happened on the athletes that I've worked with. Olbrecht already proved it. It's up to you if you want to believe it!

Lastly, just because you CAN do it doesn't mean that what you're doing is complimenting your physiology. The only way to verify your "hunch" of what works and what doesn't is to test.



no, that's correlation, not causation.

i'm not saying that what you are claiming is unproven, just what you are claiming cannot be backed up by the examples you provided.

to claim that anaerobic exercise, per se, decreases aerobic capacity, you need to provide examples of how anaerobic exercise will diminish the different factors determining aerobic capacity. Is the stroke volume affected negatively? Is capilirization affected? What about oxidative enzyme expression?

And when you cite the observation amongst the athletes you coach, is there a control with respect to training stress or training time? In other words, since anaerobic exertion is so taxing and that more recovery is required, there is less total training time when such work is incorporated. Do you observe similar decrease in aerobic capacity when the training time of regimen A (nothing over LT) is equal to that of regimen B (enough anaerobic exercise to cause decrease in aerobic capacity)? What about when training stress are the same? Obviously, you cannot answer this in an epistemologically satisfactory way because doing so would mean that you will be prescribing less training to your athletes when it is not needed, which is required in a scientific study but is probably frowned upon when a coach does it to paying athletes..

You have provided examples of how anaerobic exercises lead to a decrease in aerobic capacity, but no conclusive evidence that it is directly responsible for decreasing components that determine aerobic capacity. It may very well be that it's the decrease in training time/training stress (a result of inclusion of anaerobic work as more recovery is required) that leads to the decrease in anaerobic capacity. The most damning thing against your own assertion is that you have mentioned is that the anaerobic efforts should be metered. So, if they are metered so that overall time/stress stay similar, is there still a decrease in aerobic capacity? If not, then this invalidates the point that anaerobic exercise decrease aerobic capacity, per se.

This may seem like semantics to you, but i can assure you that it's not for the scientifically trained. All scientific studies need to have a control group, and this is lacking in the example you cited.

Once again, nothing you said has been unproven, it's just that there are not enough valid examples to make your claims convincing. Also, I did a google scholar search for author Olbrecht with the keyword anaerobic. Four peer-reviewed articles showed up, none discussing how bouts of anaerobic bouts reduces aerobic capacity. You said Olbrecht has already proved your claim. In which case, could you provided links to the medline summaries of the peer-reviewed articles by Olbrecht?
Last edited by: echappist: Apr 12, 12 20:35

Edit Log:

  • Post edited by echappist (Dawson Saddle) on Apr 12, 12 20:35