Aerobic Conditioning: Is It Important & How To Track It

Have you ever thought, do I need to be conditioning more? Or even at all? Should I be tracking my heart rate? It is possible you have not even considered it all together. Let’s take a look into why it might be valuable to you and how we can track it easily.

Aerobic Conditioning

Aerobic conditioning is basically how efficiently your heart and lungs can get oxygen to your muscles and organs. Besides the “surface” benefits of improving heart function, increasing oxygen uptake and respiratory capacity, increasing density of mitochondria in muscles, increasing capillary density, and so on… why else would you want to include aerobic training into your programing?

1. You want to live longer and increase your healthspan

2. You want to recover better and faster between training sessions

3. You want to have more energy

4. You care about your overall health and wellbeing

5. You want to improve cognitive function

Any of those sound good to you? They should. Even as a strength athlete, the benefits outweigh any potential “cost” of having aerobic training incorporated into your program. With consistent aerobic training you are more likely to maintain muscle mass and strength as you age.

It has been shown in many studies that aerobic training has one of the biggest roles in increasing longevity. It is also not just extra years but functioning years as well. Aerobic fitness can reduce your risk of all cause mortality by 30%, which is crazy! And lastly, before I drone on, the better your aerobic conditioning the faster your recovery between training sessions. At the end of the day, all recovery is aerobic.

How To Track It - Simplified

Tracking strength is fairly easy, but it is not always easy to tell if you are getting better aerobically. Without getting fancy, having a heart rate monitor will be your best friend. There are a lot of good options (watches, chest monitors, even rings) that will communicate with your phone to track, graph, and average out your heart rate in real time.

Here are a couple of the easiest ways to track progress with heart rate (HR).

1. Having a lower average resting HR

2. HR Recovery - 30 second, 1 min, 2 min

With the first option, you need to be tracking outside of your workouts. Resting Heart rate (RHR) is best checked first thing in the morning before you do anything. Having a consistent basis for this number will not only tell you if you are improving (lower being better) but it can also tell you if you are overtraining. If you wake up with a significantly elevated RHR, it is generally a sign you are not fully recovered.

The second option works well for during workouts. The concept is simple. Finish your workout, check your HR, wait 30 sec and check your HR again. Make a note of the difference. This can also be done at intervals of 1 minute and 2 minutes. This is measuring your ability to recover. The faster your HR drops back down the better. All this requires is a little consistency when keeping track.