Bleap Tests.

Cal1988

Howya.

Could any of you tell me whether continuous bleep tests will improve my Vo2max?

I played Astro footie last night for the first time in a long time, I'm a very big bloke and I smoke so I found it extremely difficult to keep up with the pace, its actually a miracle I didn't have a heart-attack on the pitch.

From September onwards I'll be playing weekly so I wanna shed some weight before then and improve fitness so I'm wondering if bleap-tests a few times a week will be beneficial?

Cheers.

Hanley

No, pushing yourself to the absolute limit with the same test multiple times per week is not a good idea. It'll improve your fitness to an extent, but it'll also run you into the ground.

It's training, not testing.

You could do something like one bleep test to about 85-90% of what you could do going all out (ie test once, see what level you could get to, then only go to 90% of that amount).

You could pick two levels to work between, like say rounds 6 to 10, rest for 2 minutes, repeat etc etc, there's loads of options to explore and play around with

Funk It

Hello, just to throw some knowledge that I have gained. One of my mates who is doing medicine and took a year out to do sports bio-medicine. For a project he was comparing 3 different training routines of numerous candidates. There were steady state, high intensity training and the other group just did whatever they normally do. I was picked for the high intensity.

Basically, we all did yo-yo tests, sprint tests and on a separate day we done the bleep test. This was to measure our base fitness.

The steady state training was just jogging on a treadmill for 28mins, twice a week at a predetermined % of your max heart rate (obtained during the yo-yo and bleep test in intervals, sorry if this is confusing).

The high intensity group, which I would know more about, did 2 sessions a week of 28 minutes. I must say I hate treadmills, I think that they are for hamsters. But basically we had to get our heart rate up to >80% of our recorded max. Then the timer started. It involved 4 minutes of flat out sprinting (keeping the heart rate within our boundary), followed by 3 minutes of cooling off, still running but lowering heart rate. This was repeated 4 times to give a 28 minute total per session.

The trick is, after a few sessions you start to get fitter, and it is very noticeable as it takes you longer, and you have to go up a few extra levels (i.e. faster) to reach the desired heart rate.

After 7 weeks of training, all groups were monitored again (yo-yo, sprint and bleep tests). I was delighted to have gone up in all 3 tests, and I even went up 3 levels in the bleep test, which was something I was over the moon with. All of the high intensity group finished with a much better improvement % overall from the baseline tests.

Its just something I was a guinea pig for, and delighted to be involved to be honest. Hope that you might get some help off it, I'm no expert but I can tell ya that the high intensity worked for me and i would do it again if I could afford a good heart rate monitor + watch thing that it used. Still hate treadmills though.

menoscemo

Funk It wrote: »

Hello, just to throw some knowledge that I have gained. One of my mates who is doing medicine and took a year out to do sports bio-medicine. For a project he was comparing 3 different training routines of numerous candidates. There were steady state, high intensity training and the other group just did whatever they normally do. I was picked for the high intensity.

Basically, we all did yo-yo tests, sprint tests and on a separate day we done the bleep test. This was to measure our base fitness.

The steady state training was just jogging on a treadmill for 28mins, twice a week at a predetermined % of your max heart rate (obtained during the yo-yo and bleep test in intervals, sorry if this is confusing).

The high intensity group, which I would know more about, did 2 sessions a week of 28 minutes. I must say I hate treadmills, I think that they are for hamsters. But basically we had to get our heart rate up to >80% of our recorded max. Then the timer started. It involved 4 minutes of flat out sprinting (keeping the heart rate within our boundary), followed by 3 minutes of cooling off, still running but lowering heart rate. This was repeated 4 times to give a 28 minute total per session.

The trick is, after a few sessions you start to get fitter, and it is very noticeable as it takes you longer, and you have to go up a few extra levels (i.e. faster) to reach the desired heart rate.

After 7 weeks of training, all groups were monitored again (yo-yo, sprint and bleep tests). I was delighted to have gone up in all 3 tests, and I even went up 3 levels in the bleep test, which was something I was over the moon with. All of the high intensity group finished with a much better improvement % overall from the baseline tests.

Its just something I was a guinea pig for, and delighted to be involved to be honest. Hope that you might get some help off it, I'm no expert but I can tell ya that the high intensity worked for me and i would do it again if I could afford a good heart rate monitor + watch thing that it used. Still hate treadmills though.

That's all well and good, but the whole point of lower intensity work is that you can do it 7 days a week.
Obviously if you are only going to train twice a week, higher intensity will prove more effective than a lower intensity. An Ideal balance would be to try one or two high intensity workouts with 3-4 lower intensity workouts per week on the other days.

You should also be doing the lower intensity work for a longer duration than High intensity work.

Mellor

I agree with menoscemo, the "study" above is massively skewed towards the HIIT group.
Who, imo, aren't doing HIIT but regualar intervals at a targetted heartrate

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