I’ve discussed many times how your aerobic fitness is strongly linked to better health, a longer life expectancy, and more quality life years. To develop your fitness, you need to do some aerobic training each week and stay consistent for a while. You’ll feel more energised, better within yourself, and be setting yourself up for a healthier future.
There are lots of ways to do aerobic training. Whether you’re doing steady jogging, intervals, cycling, brisk walking or circuits, what you’re really doing underneath it all is training your mitochondria.
What are mitochondria? – They are small structures inside your cells that help create energy. They take the oxygen you breathe to convert food into usable energy. This powers your movement, recovery, thinking and mood. You have thousands of them in each cell and how well they work plays a big role in how well you feel.
Why should you care about your mitochondria? – The more you have, and the better they function, the more energy you feel in daily life. Not just for training but also for brain clarity, general motivation, and feeling good.
Strong mitochondria have now been linked to cancer prevention, metabolic health, better immune responses and slowing the ageing process. This is one of those topics where exercise really does affect everything. Your goal should be to have the maximum number of mitochondria, operating at the highest possible level of efficiency
How to grow more mitochondria? – The main way to increase the number of mitochondria is through regular aerobic exercise. Long, steady sessions at a comfortable pace are great for this, which is where the ‘zone 2 training’ craze comes from. This type of training signals your body to start building more mitochondria so it can keep up with your energy demands.
This is one of the reasons people doing this sort of training start to feel better in everyday life. It is not just about heart and lungs. It is literally that your cells have more ability to create energy.
How to improve mitochondrial efficiency? – You can also train the ones you already have to get better at doing their job. This is what happens with more intense training, things like intervals, tempo efforts, or hard circuits. These push your body into a bit of a stress zone, and the mitochondria respond by getting sharper and more efficient. They learn to produce more energy from the same amount of oxygen and waste less of it.
This is why people who have trained for a long time can sometimes look effortless when they move. Their mitochondria are simply working more efficiently.
More vs Better Mitochondria – Whether your grow more cells or improve the current ones is mostly down to training status over the type of training done. If you’re new to aerobic training, your first gains will come from growing more mitochondria. Your body is saying “I need more of these things to keep up.” That is why beginners often get big jumps in energy and fitness in the first couple of months.
If you’ve been training for a while, most of the benefits start to come from improving how well your current mitochondria work. You might not be adding loads of new ones anymore, but you’re upgrading the ones you have.
Both are important, and ideally, your training includes a mix of long steady sessions and harder intervals to cover both sides.
Losing Mitochondria – Just like muscle, if you don’t use them, you lose them. If you stop moving, your body starts removing mitochondria it doesn’t think it needs. This happens slowly and progressively, after 7 to 14 days of doing nothing you will start to see your mitochondria begin to shrink in number and lose some of their efficiency.
The good news is they come back much faster than they did the first time. Once you’ve built some fitness, your body remembers. A week or two of getting back into consistent movement can quickly return much of what you lost.
Even small amounts of movement help. A short exercise burst of a few minutes running or a 30 minute brisk walk can maintain a surprising amount of mitochondrial health. You don’t need to be perfect, you just need to keep showing up. You need much less exercise to maintain fitness that what most people think.
What Does This Mean For You?
Whether you’re someone who’s just getting going or you’ve trained for years, your mitochondria are always listening. Every time you move, you’re either building more or making the ones you have better. And the benefits show up far beyond your workout. More energy, better mood, a longer life and fewer diseases.
If your aerobic fitness is stuck on a plateau, then it may mean you need to jump start it to get to the next level, either through increasing the number of, or efficiency of the mitochondria. This is why elite athletes have such huge amounts of volume in their training, it is the only way to keep pushing their metabolic efficiency. The good news is non elite people, need much less volume than they think, yet most people go too hard and then quit…at the expense of their long term success.
If you are wondering how your own mitochondria are doing, they will show themselves in your current fitness levels, which is easy to measure or evaluate.
Photos – I have started doing 20km+ long runs on the weekend to increase my own mitochondrial efficiency, due to long runs always injuring me I have introduced breaks to meet people and stretch, which seems to have solved the injury issue, some photos from my last two runs:
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