How to create a training schedule?

[sai]

I've read a few times now that running for example can hurt your apnea performance if done too much or wrong. At the moment I'm doing intense weight lifting two times a week for hypertrophy split up in upper and lower body exercises. I'm running 3 times a week for 30-45mins at 75% HR and I'm doing CO2 tables about 2-3 times a week and 1 session of dynamics.
I do the running mainly for the healthy effects on my cardiovascular system, since I already had to deal with high blood pressure in my youth. So getting and staying healthy is also a main factor of my sport activities.
Is there something that could to be changed to get more (noticeable) gains in terms of breathholding?

- sai

 

[growingupninja]

I've read a few times now that running for example can hurt your apnea performance if done too much or wrong. At the moment I'm doing intense weight lifting two times a week for hypertrophy split up in upper and lower body exercises. I'm running 3 times a week for 30-45mins at 75% HR and I'm doing CO2 tables about 2-3 times a week and 1 session of dynamics.
I do the running mainly for the healthy effects on my cardiovascular system, since I already had to deal with high blood pressure in my youth. So getting and staying healthy is also a main factor of my sport activities.
Is there something that could to be changed to get more (noticeable) gains in terms of breathholding?- sai

Maybe introduce a day of partial or empty lung training? My old training schedule was a little bit like yours. Mostly geared towards general fitness and ring sports, it was cardio/plyometric heavy but I managed to spearfish maybe a day a week (which tends to train CO2 tolerance the way I was doing it). When I added some apnea specific training that was primarily low O2 my general fitness performance seemed to definitely improve (better 'wind', fast recovery between rounds). My fitness level (cardio, strength/power, flexibility) was extremely high.

However about a month ago I switched things up entirely and made apnea the focus... My apnea is improving on all fronts but VO2 max and general cardio is decreased... lost 3 or 4 pounds of muscle as well. I think a little bit of apnea is really, really good for general fitness but if you train it exclusively you are going to lose performance in other 'general fitness' areas; for me primarily VO2 max and strength.