We all know and know the origin of energy in our body, either aerobically (with the presence of oxygen in addition to the oxidation of fats and/or glycogen) or anaerobically (oxidation of glycogen, very low or scarce presence of oxygen); That is why in this blog post we are going to review the benefits of improving the “aerobic engine” and conversely., the anaerobic contribution.

Input, It is necessary to analyze the sports modality where we hope to improve the athlete's performance, For example, a cyclist in eliminator tests will have a greater anaerobic demand than a cyclist in Marathon tests or ultra-distance tests., where here the importance of the aerobic pathway will be crucial.

Using WKO analysis software 5 where we can obtain graphs as seen in the entry we can obtain the contribution of each path at each point of the power curve, For example, we can compare the best 5 minutes of this year 2022 in relation to the best record of 2021 What part is aerobic and what part is anaerobic?. In this sense, we will be clear that the key to this work is detailed analysis and guidance towards where we want the athlete to improve., looking for a greater contribution anaerobically in XCO or XCE tests and vice versa, In XCM or road tests the aerobic demand will be higher.

Continuing with the WKO5 software we can talk about a greater anaerobic capacity that will be related to its FRC (funtional reserve capacity) which is the amount of KiloJoules that the athlete can consume above his mFTP. Also related to this route we can talk about a higher maximum power in some cases together with a high glycolytic capacity (kj consumed/sec).

On the contrary, The greater the aerobic motor, the more we will see athletes with a high mFTP (FTP modeling), Vo2max (your estimate at WKO5), Stamina and time to exhaustion (TTE) where the most aerobic athletes must “beat” the most glycolytic or anaerobic athletes.

Working on improving metrics like these specific to WKO5 along with other indicators will be the key to achieving the results set in the preseason..