sorry to be so vague

cliffthefish

Hi all, i have read on here,but can not find it again something about your lungs being fitter than your muscles or vise versa,one takes longer to rectify than the other,but was wondering if there is a time scale to rectify the matter,have just got into MTB seriously about 14 weeks now and on climbs find it hard(impossible)to have a conversation while my mates chat away,the thread mentioned something about using the chatting whilst exercising hard as a measure of your fitness,any thoughts???????????????

The Northern Monkey

something along the lines of - to improve endurance, ride longer at a pace that you can speak without getting out of breath IIRC.

Jonesy.

Your ability to partake in aerobic activities depends on your cardiovascular system's capacity to supply the tissues in your body with adequate oxygen, which is circulated by the heart.

So you need to give your heart some time to grow stronger. If you stress your heart too much, you will experience exhaustion; if you do not stress it enough, your exercise will be too easy. In either case, you will not be exercising at an optimal level, meaning you will not be developing your cardiorespiratory endurance very much. Chasing your mates up the hill is therefore not doing anything for you.

Fitness geeks like to calculate their training intensity based on heart rate - in brief, you should be exercising at around 65% to 85% of your maximum heart rate. In practice, this means not getting out of breath, but exercising at a pace just below that - hard enough to work up a sweat, but not so hard that you're gasping for breath and unable to even speak.

Train like this and gradually your cardio fitness will improve and those hills will become easier! As for timescales, that's a personal thing and depends on your current level of fitness, your age, your weight, and how often you exercise.

Ditch Witch

Basically, as I've just said in the Fat Club thread, you must build base fitness if you wish to improve.

To do so, you must have long slow steady workouts to allow your body to work aerobically.

When you're working so hard you can't speak, you are working anaerobically and burning much more glycogen than fat. You only have glycogen stores for up to an hour of exercise so will burn out and "bonk" or hit the wall.

The more work aerobically, the fitter your heart becomes so the harder you will be able to work and still stay aerobic (in oxygen) and burning a higher ratio of fat for fuel, saving your precious glycogen.

In short: you must have glycogen to exercise. Once it's gone, your done for the day. Anything you can do to make yourself more efficient the better. Teach your body to use more fat by improving your cardio (strong heart). You do this through slow steady endurance training.

Once you can go for over an hour, throw in intervals to shake things up.

cliffthefish

Fantastic answers,cheers guys,and female guys

mea00csf

If you do other exercise and then change your lungs may well be fitter than your muscles.

For instance when people start running who are already fit, they often injure themselves as although their cardio fitness is up to the job, the specific muscles and ligaments for running aren't and building up too far/fast quickly (even though it feels easy) can really do some damage.

I'd expect it's similar for biking, but not quite as detrimental as there is little impact, causing muscle fatigue even if you're not gasping for breath