Having a good strategy to tackle the series in WODs are fundamental to achieve the best result given your particular physical condition. Comparing yourself to the top athletes, or trying to use their strategy probably won’t work well, unless you are a top athlete! By good strategy I mean planing basically how fast you will perform your movements and how you will play your pauses. There is no better person in the world to know you better than yourself.
But firstly you gotta understand better how your body responds to exercise and how you gotta plan given your body symptoms.
One of the three main areas to observe here are: heart rate, breathing and muscle energy.
Heart Rate
Heart rate is commonly measured in beats per minute and it measures how fast your heart is pumping blood to your body. When performing your exercises in the WOD your body is moving lots of muscles, so heart needs to keep oxygen level to your muscles, so it keeps working well.
Few characteristics influence how efficient you heart works, as more prepared you are, more efficient you heart works. Good to mention that you heart is also a muscle that by exercising in your WODs will also improve your heart condition. The heart beat at rest is one of good indicators on how well you are prepared, as top athletes have rest heart rate slightly slower than regular people.
Warning about heart rate is that, if in only few reps you get your heart rate close to maximum and this is going to be a long series. Example: your heart rate skyrocket getting close to the max at your age with only 5 reps, but the workout is about performing 50 reps, so you seriously need to review and lower the weights you will use.
During training you gotta keep close attention to your heart rate, and if you are getting into your red zone, you definitely will need a pause. But pause before you get there, otherwise it will be slower to recover once you are close to the max.
Using heart monitors will be a good aid by checking how your heart rating changes during your workout. As higher your heart goes, higher your breathing frequency goes
Breathing
During your series you will feel and observe yourself catching your breath in between the reps. This happens once you get closer to the max heart beat and you need to keep your oxygen levels in your body good enough so you keep contracting your muscles.
When you reach that respiration frequency, where it is too fast inhaling and exhaling, you will waste too much time catching your breath. Plan to break your workout few reps before you reach that level. This will make your recovering faster.
Once you reach this situation of inhale exhale to fast, and probably this will happen frequently, enforce yourself to exhale with more power, this will make your lungs go empty and inhaling more fresh air, thus, being more efficient about taking oxygen to your body, then your heart beat will slow down. Respiration frequency is really attached to your heart rate, and the influence occurs in both ways: heart beating influencing breathing frequency and vice-versa.
Muscle energy
By muscle energy I mean how ready your muscle is to perform one more contraction, with what power. To lift a weight or to perform the exercises during your WOD you will have lots of muscle contractions. Going deeper and understand what it takes for a muscle to contract, it will basically need to have your celular respiration and ATP working well. Just to remember it requires glucose, oxygen and strong muscle fibers. Once all requirements are met, you will successfully contract that muscle, thus executing the rep. Those three are fundamental.
Glucose -> connected to your nutrition quality and how well you are eating before your workouts
Oxygen -> How efficiency your breathing is and how well your heart rate is pumping the oxygen thru your blood.
Strong muscle fibers -> That weight shouldn’t be heavier than your max for that movement.
As you exercise during your workout, you will feel your breathing go faster, and this is something you should try to avoid while contracting your muscles, because once you are contracting your muscles without the proper oxygen levels, you start the glycolysis process, which generates lactic acid causing your muscle fatigue.
All connected
As we can see, the 3 are all deeply connected. Getting more fitness prepared includes being stronger, good VO2 max and faster heart rating recovering. Being stronger will play one of the key differences here, since you will need less effort to perform the same exercise, thus keeping lower heart rate and breathing frequency. Once maybe you are not really strong you gotta keep checking your heart beat and breathing so you can stop before you get to the dying zone near your maximum. Once you get to your max, it is slower to recover.