What are the mechanics of getting fitter and faster?
In this article, coach Kevin looks through the mechanics of how an athlete actually gets faster. What are the adaptions? What changes does your body make and importantly, what does it need to make those changes? If you want to get under the hood and work out what makes you faster, read on below.
If you are new to sport, in the short term, exercise can feel like hard work for a gain that appears slow to arrive. To answer the commonly asked question, ‘but when will I actually get faster?’ I’d like to back it up a little and give an overview of what is going on in your body.
When we do any kind of exercise that represents a more prolonged or challenging effort than we are used to (and this is relative – whether it’s ‘couch to 5k’ or moving up a distance in triathlon), then the act of doing this exercise results in stress on our body. Your body is always trying to keep you in a state of homeostasis. This is a rather fancy-sounding term for ‘fit for purpose’, or perhaps just ‘fit’. Essentially, if you hit your body with a higher physical demand than it has seen recently, it will generate signals that will lead to adaptions to better cope with that demand if it comes around again. It’s the literal application of ‘survival of the fittest’ – your body has no idea whether you are running a marathon or trying to outrun an especially persistent woolly mammoth; all it sees is the demand. The better you can cope with the demands of life, the better your chance of survival!
So we are all genetically programmed to respond to exercise. However, there is a little more to it than that. Sports scientists came up with the term ‘supercompensation’- which describes the entire process of improvement – as exercise stress is just the first part. This stress is then followed by a subsequent downturn in performance (you are fatigued). If then, the appropriate amount of rest and recovery is then taken, resulting in a higher performance than when you started.
So that sounds straightforward, but what about the amounts? How much stress, how much recovery? Well, these things will vary based on your athletic history, your age, where you are in your training cycle, how much ‘life stress’ you are under…the list goes on. There are general guidelines, but it also varies from person to person and depends on what type of exercise you do. This is something that you (or you and your coach) will need to experiment with….but at a basic level, you could have three options – too little stress vs recovery, too much stress vs recovery, or just about right. Too little stress and your body will not be getting the message that it needs to improve; too much stress and your body cannot physically cope. Instead of adapting to get better, it goes into emergency ‘protection’ mode, which can directly or indirectly lead to all sorts of issues (RED-s is one of these).
Hopefully, you are sat somewhere in the middle, in that happy medium where a sufficient amount of stress and then recovery is being applied, leading to performance increases. Many different things are going on in your body to lead to these performance increases, but before finally get to the question of ‘when will I get faster?’ I’m going to drop down to another layer of detail – what are these signals in response to exercise that I was referring to earlier?
The two main molecular signals for improvement are AMPK & CaMK. If you’d like to get further into this, then this article will give an excellent overview, along with a detailed review
As with a lot of things in the body, there is not necessarily a one or the other type approach – rather a cross over and interaction from varying systems, but more AMPK is generated when we deplete muscle fuel stores (i.e. generally from high-intensity exercise), and more CaMK is made when we do long-duration high volume aerobic exercise.
Both of the above result in a ‘master switch’ being applied, PGC-1 alpha, which promotes more type 1 endurance muscle fibres, mitochondrial development, & both fat and glycogen oxidisation. The development of all these factors is critical in improving endurance performance.
Other shorter-term physical changes driven from exercise include increased blood volume, red blood cells, glycogen stores at a muscular level, muscle fibre recruitment, and hormonal changes to support these and future adaptations.
The longer-term structural and mechanical changes will involve, for example, muscle fibre type and proportions, heart size/stroke volume leading to greater cardiac output, blood capillary and mitochondrial density.
Changes tend to be lost at the rate they were gained – so high-intensity training-induced gains will fade off quicker without maintenance, whereas the structural endurance induced gains will stay with you for much longer. The shorter-term, high intensity driven benefits can also seem to be more affected by your starting point – relatively untrained individuals could potentially expect larger (proportional) gains than the more trained for a given workload.
So to finally answer the question – how long before I’m faster? Well, if you are looking for rapid but short term gains, then high intensity is the way to go. Of course, this comes hand in hand with a higher risk of injury – you need to ensure that you have the correct posture, mobility and control for these higher force workouts.
If you have a more long term / ambitious outlook, you’ll want to focus on the long duration aerobic side of training. It may take quite a lot longer to get there, but you can expect bigger and more enduring adaptations.
Of course, the best approach is to mix these two methods up and stack those gains – which is the basis of polarised training (approx. 80% endurance, 20% high intensity). Work on improving your performance via both these methods, and while you won’t have such a quick fix answer, you’ll become a more rounded and capable athlete. Training this way and making it a long-term habit means that you can expect to keep building on your performance consistently, year on year.
Kevin opened a B&B for cyclists in France in 2014, & then a year later decided to start a cycle coaching (level 3) qualification. This was mainly in order to be able to better support his guests (but also to make his own training more effective too). At the B&B he runs the odd training camp for cyclists but mainly offers coaching advice while guiding guests. An engineer by background, he happy diving into all sorts of training data, but also understanding that coaching is about much more than just the numbers!
After being introduced to triathlon by a good friend & then taking part in races for a couple of years he decided that a level 2 coaching course with British Triathlon was the way forward, completing this in 2019.
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