While on a cut is your muscular and cardiovascular endurance decreased at all?

Lacrosse season is 2 weeks away and Im working to strip off some fat but Im worried about running out of gas early at tryouts because I am eating less calories than I am using up.


Also what kinds of combonations of training do you guys do for raising cardiovascular and muscular endurance? I read that getting a stronger core is one of the best things you can do to help your endurance. Im thinking long distance running, sprints, suicides. At this point im not too critical about losing muscle because my back is lagging behind from the rest of my body and after im done with my cut, im hoping to widen up.

one last question....

How long does it take to significantly raise your endurance and get in better shape? Is it better to train every day or every other day?

Lacrosse needs speed and stamina. I think almost invariably a cut will increase your aerobic fitness because of the extra cardio.

You should get some long distance aerobic work in as well as some anaerobic sprints. You'd also do well to specifically increase your VO2 max, which will increase your endurance in just about everything from weight-lifting to running.

Zenspharaohs is the man to talk to about the VO2 max and it is, by far, the most important component of cardiovascular fitness, IMO. He's also very knowledgeable about core conditioning through exercise combination and making an unstable environment.

As far as specific conditioning for lacrosse, I used to live (last year in highschool) next to a now Division 1 goalie (http://loyolagreyhounds.collegesports.com/sports/m-lacros/mtt/peaty_alex00.html). In the gym, he spent a lot of time working with a trainer on core conditioning using the swiss-ball and the cable tower, weighted twisting, as well as on leg exercises.

I play D, I might even play LSM(long stick middie) so improving recovery time and stamina is something that need because its a very stop and go position.

While training for endurance do you continue to lift in the gym?

I am pretty uneducated on VO2 max, cardiovascular fitness ect, if anyone could provide any information or articles that would be awesome.

I play D, I might even play LSM(long stick middie) so improving recovery time and stamina is something that need because its a very stop and go position.

While training for endurance do you continue to lift in the gym?

I am pretty uneducated on VO2 max, cardiovascular fitness ect, if anyone could provide any information or articles that would be awesome.
Always continue to lift in the gym. Lifting helps preserve muscle and prevent loss in addition to building it. You can also easily tell if you're losing muscle when your lifts start falling across the board.

Check out this site: http://www.brianmac.demon.co.uk/vo2max.htm

If you have good squat form and great mental fortitude, you might look into endurance squatting. Again, zenspharaohs is the man for these type of things.

While on a cut is your muscular and cardiovascular endurance decreased at all?

Lacrosse season is 2 weeks away and Im working to strip off some fat but Im worried about running out of gas early at tryouts because I am eating less calories than I am using up.

How long does it take to significantly raise your endurance and get in better shape? Is it better to train every day or every other day?

Eat enough extra calories to cover your activity and you won't lose endurance.

It takes about two months for an untrained person to get a bump in their cardiovascular fitness (which translates to endurance).

If you are already doing sports with endurance then you won't get off so easily. Once you get your VO2max and lactate threshold up the easy part, then it gets hard. In the first nine or so months of training, my VO2max went from 25 to about 48. To get from there to the 55 I have at the moment was another seven months. So like anything else - early gains are fast and then you have push harder and harder.

If you really want to work on your endurance, then you want to do some hard intervals - and make sure you eat up to cover the calories required even on your cut.

Yeah it'll hurt it. I went on a cutting diet for a time during some marathon training and the shorter runs (6-8 miles) were fine. Then one Saturday came my 15 mile run. I'd done 14 the week before and did ok but this 15 mile run was CRAP. The first 10-12 miles were fine and then I just felt apart. I felt like I was dragging by ass bad and my form started to get sloppy. The liver holds 300-500 grams of glycogen, depending on your body and your level of fitness, and once that's gone it has to find energy from less readily available areas (known by endurance athletes as bonking or hitting the wall because over a fairly short period of time you can go from feeling merely tired to brutally exhausted and your body screams at you to stop). If you're on a cutting diet, the glycogen stores are among the first to get drained (for each gram of glycogen stored, there is 2-3 grams of water, so this is why when you go for a couple of days on low cal the weight just flies off so damn quickly initially), so if you try and engage in an endurance activity with those stores already drained, it won't be pretty.

In regards to fitness and endurance and all that, I know that VO2 max does grow quite slowly--far, far slower than I'd have imagined, but if you jump into a new sport you'll find that you can perform in it better quite quickly. I know that two months into a proper running program my V02 max may not have objectively increased that much, but I was able to handle far distances with ease utterly unheard of to me before. I could keep up a faster speed for a greater distance, and in short distances I could really crank it up nicely, so the body getting used to a sport comes into play as well.

If you have good squat form and great mental fortitude, you might look into endurance squatting. Again, zenpharaohs is the man for these type of things.

Endurance squatting is a great thing. I also do endurance lunges with dumbell curl and press. You get the idea - any compound lift can be the basis of an endurance workout if you have the correct resistance. So if you don't have a squat rack of your own, no problem, you can still do endurance lifting. Just make sure it's stuff you can do safely. With the lower resistance for an endurance set, safety is not so much a matter of getting stapled to the floor, it's mostly about knowing to stop before you get weak enough to lose your form.

The advantages over running, etc., is that you can choose a resistance that is pretty heavy and then a tempo which suits, and then typically it is low impact. The lower rep counts than cardio also mean that you are grinding your joints less for the same payoff of elevated circulation. And that elevated circulation feeds not just your muscle, but the hard to feed soft tissues like cartilage.

Wearing a heart monitor helps a lot. You can use that to make sure you are getting the exercise dose that you want, and it helps get you a guideline for how much to eat to cover it.

Endurance squatting is a really fun alternative to traditional cardio....Hey! why are you guys all looking at me like that?

Yeah it'll hurt it.

I know that two months into a proper running program my V02 max may not have objectively increased that much, but I was able to handle far distances with ease utterly unheard of to me before.

The problem here is that you have to adjust the cutting diet so that the caloric deficit is not increased by the endurance training. If you do that, then I don't know that endurance will necessarily suffer on a cut.

I've dropped 50 pounds in one continuous "cut" the past seventeen months (about 3 pounds a month) and all the time my endurance has been continuously increasing. I just set another personal best in the mile today. (Not that fast, but the point is, faster than before). I have made a pretty good dent in rowing now too have put in a little under 500km since Thanksgiving on top of my normal training.

What this shows is that if you eat enough to keep the caloric deficit a bit below 500 calories a day (mine works out to like 350 calories a day) then you do not necessarily have to lose endurance even though you are dropping weight.

As to the long distance deal - I'm guessing that if your VO2max didn't increase much - and that is quite plausible - what happened is that the fraction of calories produced by fat increased. This happens if you improve circulation and build up your ability to metabolize fat. This means that your glycogen gets drawn down more slowly, and you last longer before you bonk.

There are a bunch of physiological adaptations that could increase the ability of your body to burn fat to produce calories - but the one that I think is most likely is that your Type IIa fibers get more mitochondria, and conversion of Type IIb fibers to IIa. Now you only need slightly more oxygen to burn fat instead of glycogen, so you can increase endurance a lot with only a slight increase of VO2max. Why from burning fat? Because even just one pound of fat has 3500 calories.

I don't know much about cardio per se (I was never big on it BEFORE cutting), but I know that after hockey, I am much more sore after while I'm on a deficit.

Hockey is anaerobic fitness.

I don't know much about cardio per se (I was never big on it BEFORE cutting), but I know that after hockey, I am much more sore after while I'm on a deficit.

Hockey is anaerobic fitness.

Make sure you hydrate properly, and do warm up and cool down. This helps a lot of people with soreness. Good cardio fitness - whether your sport is about aerobic fitness or not - speeds recovery during and after workout.