Anaerobic training is physical training that relies primarily on fuel sources that don't require oxygen to process. Unlike pay-as-you-go aerobic exercise, which can be sustained for hours in trained athletes, anaerobic exercise is done at very high intensity and leads to exhaustion within minutes. Examples include a series of bench presses, a set of sprints and an all-out quarter-mile run. Because lactic acid quickly builds up but is rapidly metabolized during anaerobic exercise, athletes do intermittent anaerobic training sessions, taking rest breaks between exercises to get in more total work in the session.
Physiology
As described by the American Sports Medicine Institute, every kind of exercise includes a combination of aerobic and anaerobic metabolism, with the proportion shifting from overwhelmingly anaerobic for events lasting a minute or less to overwhelmingly aerobic for activities such as 5K runs, long bicycle rides and walking. Because of the biochemical reactions that take place inside cells during heavily anaerobic activity, lactic acid accumulates, muscle-cell acidity rises, and work must slow or stop in order for the muscle cells to return to their baseline condition. This is the rationale for doing anaerobic exercise to near-exhaustion, resting and repeating the process, as it builds what physiologists often term "anaerobic power."
Short Sprints
Short sprints, or bursts of all-out running lasting under 30 seconds or so, represent the consummate intermittent anaerobic workout. Athletes do a set number of sprints, or repetitions, at or very close to maximum speed, but stop before muscles fatigue as a result of reaching their anaerobic capacity. By taking rest breaks involving standing, walking or slow jogging, athletes allow their muscles to clear lactic acid, replenish anaerobic fuel sources such as creatine phosphate and glucose, and regain their wind. This permits more high-end work to be done than if athletes merely mimic their specialty event by running it all-out a few times. The same principle applies to cycling and other activities.
Interval Workouts
Interval workouts, which are like sprint workouts with longer distances and longer recoveries, have long been a staple of the programs of endurance athletes, who must do more than just engage in long, low-intensity exercise in order to prepare themselves for the stress of a long race. Even a marathon, which takes the best runners in the world over two hours to complete, requires anaerobic endurance to tolerate mid-race pace changes and muster up a fast finish. Dr. Carl Paton, of the School for Sport and Exercise Science at the Waikato Institute of Technology in Hamilton, New Zealand, and others have shown that interval training raises endurance performance by as much as 8 percent compared to endurance-only training.
Hill Repeats
Running hill repeats helps runners generate added power as they float in and out of oxygen debt. As it applies to runners, power, or force applied per unit time, refers to the ability to produce "explosive" movements. Because you have to fight gravity in order to climb grades, hill running is, in physical terms, a form of weight training, and accordingly it is primarily anaerobic. This induces additional muscle protein synthesis and an increase in muscle-cell enzyme activity that in turn increases energy production at a cellular level.
References
- "The Journal of Physiology"; Similar Metabolic Adaptations During Exercise After Low Volume Sprint Interval and Traditional Endurance Training in Humans; Kirsten A. Burgomaster, et al.; January 2008
- "Sportscience"; Effects of High-Intensity Training on Performance and Physiology of Endurance Athletes; Carl D. Paton and Will G. Hopkins; November 2004
- The American Sports Medicine Institute: Anaerobic Training
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