The Medical Center 10k Classic

Physical Activity Readiness Assessment

Training Schedules

Eating For Energy

Improving Your Cardiovascular Fitness

Keeping Your Cool

Stretching

Warming-Up & Cooling-Down

Final Preparations for the Big Event

IMPROVING YOUR CARDIOVASCULAR FITNESS

The goal of cardiovascular exercise is to increase the amount of oxygen your body can process to produce muscular energy.

To do this, you have to moderately overload your lungs, heart, blood vessels, and muscles by causing these systems to work harder than they're used to. This means walking/ jogging further or faster than you normally do.

Overloading stresses your cardiovascular system. During recovery, your body adapts to the higher workload and grows stronger

Here are several overload methods of increasing your cardiovascular fitness:

• Go the same distance, but increase your pace
• Go the same pace, but increase your distance
• Gradually increase your distance and pace
• Train on hills, 1-2 times per week
• "Speed burst" training, no more than once per week
  1. warm-up for 10-15 minutes
  2. very high intensity for 1 ½ - 3 minutes
  3. recover with easy exercise for 3-5 minutes
  4. repeat interval 2-6 times
  5. cool-down for 10 minutes
• "Sustained speed" training, no more than once per week
  1. warm-up for 10-15 minutes
  2. high intensity for 5-15 minutes
  3. recover with easy exercise for 5-10 minutes
  4. repeat interval 1-2 times
  5. cool-down for 10 minutes

But you don't want to do too much too soon. Otherwise, your body won't have enough time to adapt to the higher exercise intensity and you may develop an injury. A general guideline is not to increase your mileage by more than 10% a week and to make sure you schedule rest days in your training program.