CONDITIONING IS MAGIC

I remember the exact moment I discovered that conditioning was magic.  My sophomore year of high school, I joined the school wrestling team.  Prior to that, I was a fat kid, and my freshman year I played football.  I went to a small enough school that I played both sides of the line, as a center and nose tackle…which is also how I was able to join the wrestling team my sophomore year with NO wrestling experience whatsoever.  I had lost about 25lbs the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, and no longer had the ONE thing I had going for me in football: weight, so now I had to try a different sport.  Wrestling is an awesome sport, because you’ll get taught how to shoot a single leg, how to sprawl, and then get cut loose to go wrestle at full speed.  Within 2 weeks of my first lesson, I was in my first tournament…and I did AWFUL.  BUT, thankfully, there was another “fish” just like me in the losers bracket, and I got to square off against him after my first loss.  Wrestling is an EXHAUSTING sport, and even though I had been doing a lot of cardio to help cut those 25lbs, being in the 3rd round of a match after only 2 weeks of wrestling training, this other dude and I were GASSED.  As we both stood there, hands on our knees, facing each other, waiting for the other guy to do something, it dawned on me that, if I just did SOMETHING right then and there, I could actually win.  So I gathered up my reserves, spear tackled the dude, fell on top of him and got a win by pin.  At that moment, I realized that conditioning was magic, and the guy who had the better conditioning stood the chance of actually winning.

Yeah, I imagine we looked like this by that point

So how is conditioning magic?  Conditioning makes EVERYTHING ELSE better when it gets better.  It’s the rising tide that raises all boats, and, consequently, the very same tide that, when it goes out, you discover who has been swimming naked this whole time.  What’s also magical about conditioning is the inside dividends it pays off.  A VERY small investment in conditioning pays off HUGE in matters of getting bigger and stronger, whereas the same cannot be said in regards to training for hypertrophy (and, by extension, strength).  

How does conditioning help you get bigger and stronger?  When your conditioning is better, you recover between sets faster.  This means that, in any given amount of time, you can accumulate more volume in your training.  You’ll either be able to get in more sets, more reps per set, or use a higher weight on your worksets compared to if you had worse conditioning.  In addition, conditioning can improve your recovery between workouts themselves.  A common trope is for a trainee to do a leg training session and then spend the next 4 days walking around like a wind up toy because their legs are sore.  BUT, if that said trainee were to engage in some prowler pushes or a few rounds of thrusters, they will get some restorative blood flow into the healing muscles and find that they bounce back quicker…which means having another opportunity to train due to having recovered quicker…which means more volume…which means more growth.

Sometimes recovery can REALLY suck

And this is just addressing the benefit of conditioning in the realm of getting bigger and stronger: the other benefits are rather obvious.  Conditioning will improve your cardiovascular shape, muscular endurance, give you extra avenues for skill practice of certain movements, improve mobility, etc.  Do a few bear complexes “Crossfit style” where you thruster out of the clean and push press out of the back squat and you’re going to become fast AND mobile.  Bodyweight circuits will get you moving your body through space JUST like one of those mobility drills you like so much while ALSO actually making you more awesome.  

In that regard, I’ve listed a whole bunch of things that are considered conditioning, which inevitably leads to the question of “how do I do conditioning?”  Whenever I get asked this question, it’s hard for me to grasp, because my approach has basically been “do something that sucks for longer than you want to”, but the more I think about it the more I realize I DO have some sort of system, so I figure I’d share it in case you’d like to use it.

CONDITIONING MATRIX

Realizing conditioning is magic sucks because now you HAVE to do it

Ok, so to start: conditioning WILL happen EVERY day.  When you start off with that, figuring conditioning becomes easier. 

From there, it becomes a question of how much time do I have that day to dedicate to conditioning.  If an hour is available, I then have another decision to make: hard or easy conditioning, to steal from Jim Wendler.  This decision is easy: if it’s ALSO a day I’ll be lifting, I do easy conditioning, typically in the form of a walk (either weighted or unweighted).  If it’s a day with no lifting, I then opt for a hard conditioning workout.  Some classics that fit within this are the Kalsu WOD, Faust, Murph, the Tower of Babel, Juarez Valley Front Squats, etc.  This is typically where a lot of my “bad ideas” are born, as I’ll come up with something that occupies the time and absolutely crushes me.

My brain ALL the time

If I DON’T have that kind of time, I then go for short, intense conditioning sessions.  A 4 minute walk is pretty worthless for conditioning, but a tabata workout can have a great training effect in that short of a timespan.  Here is where things like tabata, Fran, Grace, Hill sprints, etc, can go a long way.  

Some days, I start out thinking I’m going to have an hour to do conditioning and my schedule gets compromised, so I switch to a short intense session.  Other times, my schedule opens up out of nowhere and I grab a long, low intensity session.  Capitalize on every opportunity you get.  If you try to be too rigid in an attempt to “optimize” your conditioning, you’re going to get frustrated and end up simply NOT doing a conditioning session.  Some times, my schedule makes it so that I don’t get in a low intensity session for damn near a month, but then a light season of work rolls around and I end up getting in a TON of them.  It will all even out.

Regarding what movements to use once you’ve determined what protocol to take: conditioning can be restorative AND a good way to get in extra volume, so I try to maximize that.  What this means is, I’ll train muscles/movements that I’ve either trained THAT day OR the day/days before, BUT I tend to avoid movements/muscles that I have coming up.  The way my lifting week shakes out (ideally) is I press on the first day of the week and then squat on the second day of the week.  For my first day’s conditioning, this will mean I’ll typically do something like Grace later in the day so I can get in a little extra shoulder pressing volume AND start the recovery process of my shoulders.  BUT, I’m not going to do Fran, because thrusters are a front squat and press, and that could cause me to carry some fatigue into my quads coming into my squat day.  Grace is about cleaning and pressing, so it’s all good before squat day.  Now, on the NEXT day, AFTER my squats, I’ll most likely intentionally do something like Fran or something thruster focused, because the front squats will help my legs recover AND the pressing will be good on my shoulders.  And then day 3 is typically Tower of Babel with front squats, which will, again, get blood flowing into my legs to help them recover.

With all this, the best thing you can do now is try a bunch of different conditioning workouts so that you have a rolodex (super dated term) of workouts to rotate through on any given moment.  I wrote up my book of bad ideas, which contains an assortment of conditioning workouts, but along with that you can check out “Tactical Barbell II” or the website “wodwell.com” to mine some ideas.  Try out a bunch, see what suits you, and from there you’ll gain some ability to do some free styling.  Swap out movements, do longer rounds, shorter rest periods, stack workouts on top of themselves, etc.  

And if in doubt: do Tabata burpees.