2 minutes at a time

I have been running for a long time, since high school on and off, and very consistently over the last several years. I run a reasonably fast mile and 5k (7.5 to 8 minutes) but I have felt like my endurance in sparring has been on a plateau for some time.

I decided to take a look at what trainers were saying about the subject and discovered that most seem to have moved off the straight road work to interval training. At the same time, one doesn't just abandon the aerobic training that has worked very well over the years. The thing is that fight sports are almost universally anaerobic exercises, short bursts of only a few minutes requiring peak effort. Interval running, hard dashes or climbs at speed, train for the ability to expend the energy very quickly and with power. This expenditure can go from seconds up to a maximum of 2 minutes or so. apparently as you get to the 2 minute mark the exercise begins to become more aerobic. So I realized that my running has been oriented more towards training for distance running than to kickboxing.

Here's what I have started doing to improve it. Any day that I am not in the gym sparring or on pad work, I run on the following pattern. I am continuing the running at distance but am adding a series of interval dashes in the first couple of miles. So the pattern goes: .5 mile warm-up jog, 2 minutes sprint, 1 minute jog (repeated 4 times, 1 round longer than any amateur fight I am likely to be in), then finish at normal 7.5-8 minute mile speed for the remaining distance, generally 5K. I am enjoying this new pattern (well enjoying is probably a strong word) because it is preserving my aerobic training and improving my anaerobic training. I think I detect improvement when sparring, but its early days.