I was watching some sports this past week and being interested in fitness, I compared the sports and running for the cardio-respiratory benefits. One event was the Tour de France and the other was the Wimbledon Tennis Championships. The athletes in the Tour de France have some of the stages of the Tour well over 100 miles and take over five hours to complete. Some of the men’s tennis games went for five sets that lasted close to five hours. When I trained for marathons and was doing 20 - 22 mile runs, I set aside three hours to complete the distance. All of these events require lots of endurance and a strong heart and lungs to finish.
It has been recorded that the resting heart rate of athletes in the Tour de France have pulse rates in the mid-30 beats per minute. The fact that they have a faster pulse rate when competing for five hours puts them near the top of endurance athletes. The main muscle group for a bicyclist is the legs. The trunk and arms are not involved as much other than support for the legs. The legs really get a workout when the stage has mountains in the route. Their bikes are special compared to most of the bikes an average person would buy at a bike shop. While the bikes are some of the very best, the athlete still needs to put five hours of effort during a stage.
The tennis players will have a five set game that can last almost five hours. The tennis players get breaks where they can sit down for a few minutes after several games. But when they are playing, they are moving fast and in all directions. For a runner it is similar to doing intervals on a track where the athlete will run a lap fast and then rest before doing another lap. For training purposes, the heart will beat very fast, slow down a little, then beat fast again. How does this compare to a bicyclist that has that steady heart rate for those five hours? The heart rate of the bicyclist remains relatively steady for the event compared to the tennis player whose heart rate varies from fast to slower to resting. The cyclist is primarily using the leg muscles where the tennis player is using the muscles of the entire body.
