I began a walking holiday yesterday and just going into town for some shopping had me completely out of breath walking up a medium grade hill back to the apartment. It was so bad I began to fear there might be something wrong with me. After a nights sleep we began one of the first proper walks, it was steep going for a couple of hours on tough terrain, but compared to the previous day I was feeling a lot better.
It got me thinking-not always a good thing-but is it the case that the body settles into a groove with maximal loads after weeks of regular 3 day a week training, which essentially puts the body into low gear in order to cope with the heavy lifts. Does lifting then provide sufficient general fitness with maximal lifts in some physiological sense, then it has to shift gears for the totally different sub-maximal effort of hill walking. I'm surprised at how quickly I'm adapting considering that first day feeling like death. Definitely going to try and fit in some conditioning work prior to future walking holidays.
In terms of cardio vascular fitness, just how much can weight training be relied on to provide sufficient fitness to provide a base line for sub-maximal activities given a couple of days to adapt to them ? Or is it the case that if we really need to add that into training ? Is half an hour with the prowler sufficient, or does it require longer sessions of CV activity ?