[psathyrella]

Is there a benefit to doing some of your ARCing fasted?

On the one hand, for those of us not free soloing freerider, most vertical terrain seems likely to be pretty thoroughly anaerobic for our upper body, which makes me think I’d want to be fairly sugared up to train my upper body, and focus my fasted aerobic workouts on convincing my lower body to suck up less carb during the approach to the steep climbing, leaving more carbs for my upper body on the steep stuff.

On the other hand, the Anderson Bros make pretty clear that a large point of ARCing is building up your aerobic fibers to provide support for the anaerobic ones (as frequently discussed in the context of the lower body on this forum) — but unless I missed it they don’t talk about fasted training to improve this adaptation.

thanks

Topic

[Anonymous]

Anonymous on May 22, 2018 at 1:59 pm #10013

It is unlikely that adapting the upper body muscles to be better fat burners is going to help much with your climbing endurance. The intensity for all but lower angle (low 5th class) climbing is too high and hence needs to fueled by glycolysis. This is probably the rational behind the Anderson Bros not even mentioning the aerobic threshold, below which, fat is the primary fuel. On top of that, it is common for the upper body to contain a higher percentage of FT fibers than the legs. Makes sense right? We evolved to walk around for hours on just our legs. Quadrupeds have equal ST fibers in front and hind legs.

ARCing is meant to be done just below the anaerobic threshold so will be using significant amounts of glycogen for fuel. It is going to be a more productive session if you have some carbs on board for ARCing.

Scott