During preseason, a common phrase you’ll hear thrown around is base training. So what is it? In a nutshell, there are two main types of training: aerobic and anaerobic. Aerobic training focuses on improving cardiorespiratory endurance. Anaerobic training focuses on increasing muscular strength and your body’s ability to buffer lactic acid in the body. So when we are base training, we are trying to keep our body in an aerobic state. Anaerobic training is still important to the endurance athlete, but for the sake of discussion, we will keep this to the base training and talk about anaerobic training in another article.
I’m not talking nature’s four seasons, I’m talking as an athletic performance season. As athletes we are really good at training and over training and less likely to take breaks for fear of detraining or decreasing our training benefits. We all know that recovery is just as important as training itself. So how much is too much? Or, how much is enough?