Individual and Group Responses of Cardiorespiratory Fitness to Running and Cycling Sprint Interval Training

Abstract

Digby, L, McCarthy, SF, Bornath, DPB, Copeland, JL, and Hazell, TJ. Individual and group responses of cardiorespiratory fitness to running and cycling sprint interval training. J Strength Cond Res 37(4): e313–e316, 2023—Sprint interval training (SIT) has gained popularity as an effective way to improve peak oxygen consumption (V̇O₂peak) and subsequently health in a time-efficient manner. In addition, SIT has demonstrated improvements of ∼5–12% in V̇O₂peak for both running and cycling protocols, although comparisons of differing modalities have yet to be examined. Therefore, this study sought to determine group and individual responses to running and cycling SIT while examining any crossover effects of running and cycling SIT when V̇O₂peak is tested in different modes of exercise where 18 subjects completed either 3 weeks of cycling SIT (6 male, 3 female) or running SIT (5 male, 4 female) consisting of 4–6 repeated 30-second all-out bouts interspersed with 240 seconds of recovery. Cycling and running V̇O₂peak tests were completed pretraining and post-training for the investigation of mode-specific cardiorespiratory fitness improvements. There were main effects of time for cycling V̇O₂peak (P = 0.022, ${\text{η}}_{\text{p}}^2$ = 0.499) and running V̇O₂peak (P = 0.080, ${\text{η}}_{\text{p}}^2$ = 0.334) that seem greater when testing in the same mode as training (∼+5.5%). A similar proportion of responders were identified in both training modes (∼67%) suggesting running and cycling SIT are both effective for improving cardiorespiratory fitness. These results suggest that the specificity of testing and training are important for SIT and that both running and cycling SIT are similarly effective at improving V̇O₂peak.