With winter firmly upon us, many sailors will have bundled their boats up until fairer weather. While boats are packed away in garages or wrapped up in the boat yard, now is the perfect time to focus on other ways of achieving your best performance out on the race course.

To help keep us active and motivated, we ve teamed up with RYA exercise Physiologist, Adrian Campbell, to find out what you can do over those long winter months to increase your fitness levels and be in your best physical condition for the big spring re-launch.

In this series Adrian provides exercise advice and techniques to help get the most of your time on water.

Exercise Part 2 Interval/Lactate Training

In Part One of physical training we looked at the importance of aerobic fitness as the foundation to your sailing. Aerobic fitness is key to reducing the physiological strain on the human body when racing, improving recovery from short, intense bursts of activity and helping to reduce mental fatigue.

Part of aerobic training is also your ability to work at a high intensity for long periods of time. When it s windy some of our Olympic sailors work at a constant 80-90% maximum heart rate (maxHR) for as many as three 45-minute races a day, with heart rate peaking at 95%maxHR in some races.

The only way they get used to working this hard is to replicate racing conditions on the land in the form of interval / lactate training.

Whenever you exercise the body produces waste products such as lactic acid and carbon dioxide as part of energy metabolism. Both lactic acid and carbon dioxide inhibit the muscle from contracting fully therefore causing fatigue.

At low exercise intensities you produce small amounts of the waste products and they are flushed out of the muscle into the blood with no adverse effect to performance. However, the harder you exercise the more waste products your body produces.

The point where you re producing more lactic acid than your body can flush out of the muscle is called the Lactate Threshold (LT).

A fundamental difference between athletes is often how high their LT is and how much of the waste products they can tolerate before fatiguing.

To determine the LT you generally need to test in a laboratory, which is out of reach most sailors. However, the abundance of research suggests the majority of people s LT is around 80-85%maxHR.

The best way of improving your LT is through interval training training hard at your LT intensity and then resting before repeating this time and time again. How long each hard interval and each recovery interval is depends on your level of fitness and history of training.

At the lowest level I would recommend one minute at 80-85%maxHR (see Part One for calculating maxHR) followed by three minutes easy/rest. You should look to repeat this 10-12 times, resulting in a 40-48 minute long session.

It s important you keep active in the rest period as this speeds up the removal of the waste products from the muscle; resting completely causes the lactic acid to pool in the muscle and makes each subsequent interval effort harder still.

As you get fitter, follow the principles of training outlined in Part One making increasing the exercise duration and slowly reducing the recovery period. In time, you could do 15 minutes at 80-85%maxHR with only five minutes recovery and doing three intervals. Make sure you never go beyond a ratio of exercising to recovery of 3:1.

Whether you train by running, rowing, cycling, swimming or boxing etc as long as you can get into the 80-85%maxHR zone, with time and training, you benefit in two main ways:
1) The human body will flush more of the waste products out of the muscle at a faster rate resulting in you being able to work the boat harder before you start to fatigue.
2) Your body will also have a higher tolerance of the waste products in the muscle so you can deal with a higher build up of the waste products before the body begins to fatigue.

I would look to do this interval session once a week in conjunction with 2-3 of the 70-75%maxHR steady state sessions I introduced in Part One.

NB. If you are new to exercise please consult your GP before starting any training program.