Performance
Elite mountain athletes and coaches explain endurance development for steep, technical terrain.
Training only keeps working if each load becomes gradually larger than the ones before it. The body adapts remarkably well to frequent gentle nudges, so the increase should match the time it needs to adapt. The authors' rule of thumb is that beginners can raise yearly training time by up to about 25 percent.
Training load should rise and fall in waves so the body can return to balance after each build-up. An extreme version used by advanced athletes works like this. A slightly easy week comes first, then a short planned block of very heavy load, then a substantial recovery period.
Results come from a regular schedule kept up with minimal interruption, and that takes motivation and discipline. Easy base aerobic work should be gentle enough to repeat day after day without wearing you down.
There is no single recipe for maximum fitness, and only you can tune the program that suits you. Following any plan blindly, without understanding why it works, can hold back or even undermine your performance.
What limits endurance is fatigue, so the purpose of training is to make you more resistant to it. A fatigue-resistant athlete holds pace instead of slowing down.
The authors write that even a slender, well-trained endurance athlete can carry up to 100,000 calories as readily usable fat. Humans are built for endurance, an efficient design inherited from our ancestors.
Training has to be understood as a whole, not just time spent exercising. Work, the amount and quality of rest, life stress, and strength work all shape the outcome. The general basics of this are much the same across all endurance sports.
Correct training deliberately pushes one or more of the body's systems into a crisis state, and that stress is what forces its structure and function to change. Without that disturbance there is nothing for the body to adapt to.
Workouts should match what the goal actually requires, not what is fashionable. The authors saw athletes adding high-intensity intervals that alpine climbing does not call for, and so they left that kind of work out.
In healthy people, the main bottleneck on oxygen intake is how much blood the heart pumps with each beat. That stroke volume fixes the absolute upper limit of aerobic endurance.