CONDITIONING IS THE ANSWER

Oh my god another post about conditioning.  But hey: it’s what I’m known for these days, and man I wish I had jumped on this train EARLIER so I could’ve spent even MORE time being absolutely bananas in my training, but here we are, and hopefully you can learn from my mistakes and benefit from my rambling.

Rambling about the iron...you get it?!

 

Conditioning is the answer to EVERYTHING in matters of physical transformation.  This is like having a one-sided die, or a broken magic 8-ball.  It’s honestly a bit of a let-down to have it already all figured out, but conditioning just plain fixes, addresses, completes and DOES everything, to the point that, as I reach my “twilight” competing years, I’m fairly certain that my training is pretty much going to be ONLY conditioning and heavy lifting will fall to the wayside.

 

I’ve already written how “conditioning is magic”, but for some key points: when you improve conditioning, you improve EVERYTHING.  The opposite is not necessarily the case.  Wanna get bigger and stronger?  Conditioning.  How?  For one, by improving your ability to recover BETWEEN SETS, you improve your ability to accumulate training density.  You can get in more volume in less time, because you can recover from intense sets quicker.  This means shorter rest periods WITHOUT having to use jazzercise-esque loads to accomplish it, which means more worksets per workout (assuming you are a human that has a schedule and only a finite amount of time to get things done). 

Like this guy for instance

 

On top of that, conditioning improves your ability to recover between WORKOUTS, and it does it twofold.  One: a better conditioned athlete is simply a healthier/more able athlete, which means they recover from training faster than a deconditioned athlete.  We call this “being in shape”.  Conditioning improves your base of general physical preparedness (assuming you aren’t conditioning like an absolute and total idiot), which means you can bounce back from almost anything.  If you and Joe couch cruiser decide to play a 3 hour pick-up game of beach volleyball today, he’s going to be floored for a week while you’ll be hammering your squats in the morning. 

 

But along with that, conditioning ITSELF is a recovery agent FROM training.  I feel that this is one of the more undervalued aspects of conditioning work.  When you do conditioning, you have an opportunity to train the muscles you have recently trained such that you get fresh blood pumping into the area to help promote recovery from training.  And, once again, unless you choose to condition like an idiot, conditioning isn’t going to further tax said muscle but instead help bring it back to life and be ready to perform again.  I’ve personally observed this with my various Deep Water runs.  The first time I ran it, I did NO conditioning outside of the Day 5 “active recovery” work, and I walked like a toy soldier for 6 days after the squat workout.  The second time I did it, I did some sort of thruster based conditioning work after the squat and could bounce back within a day or two.  This time around, I’ve been doing daily Tabata Kettlebell Front Squats (thanks Dan John!) ON TOP OF a daily conditioning session…and I don’t even get sore from squats anymore.  My body is so accustomed to squatting that there isn’t any real degree of volume that can impact it at this point, and every day I’m flooding my legs with fresh, restorative bloodflow. 

"I FEEL SO REFRESHED!"

 

What’s REALLY king for this strategy are movements without an eccentric load.  Sled pushes/pulls/drags, tire flips, high rep Olympic lift (I can hear the Crossfit haters gnashing their teeth), kettlebell work, stone/sandbag/keg loading, etc.  Glenn Pendlay wrote about the benefit of this, and it’s a “secret” that’s honestly been known by quite a few folks in the training world but we just love to forget it.  A REAL low cost option is just plain old running uphill.  No eccentric load. 

 

BUUUUUT, what really prompted me to write this post today was “pet lifts”, and how conditioning is the answer to that problem.  I get it.  We all have lifts we “love” to do.  And I write that in quotes because exercise sucks and if you love it, you’re most likely a masochist, but still, we have our “pet lifts”.  “Yeah, this program is great, but where can I fit in front squats/zercher squats/atlas stones/RDLs/Turkish get ups/etc etc”.  In conditioning.  THAT’S where you can fit them in! 

Trust me: you can find a place for it!

 

You no longer need to screw up your strength work by trying to shoehorn in a movement that doesn’t belong there.  You no longer need to worry about how you’re not hitting your muscles the requisite amount of times per week (twice right?  Unless thrice is an option?  I hear the Bulgarians go 5x a week.)  You no longer need to add another day to 5/3/1 to become the row day/arm day/calf day/etc.  All of this can be answered WITH CONDITIONING.

 

Get creative people!  Reference my “Devilish Strength/Demonic Conditioning” idea: conditioning CAN be chaos.  In fact, I argue it SHOULD be chaos.  Because we need to condition our bodies FOR chaos.  When all our body knows is order, that’s all it can operate under.  Well that’s cool when everything goes right, but if your shoe comes untied mid squat or you get a piece of dust in your eye, you may find that things are no longer going “according to plan”, and the trainee that has spent some time learning chaos will be able to overcome and survive.  The other guy?  I don’t want to be him.

Chaos winning

 

“I need more arm training!”  Cool: do a circuit workout of rope climbs and dips.  Or arm-over-arm sled drags and burpees.  Or set a goal for 100 chin ups and EMOM do 5 close grip push ups.  Wanna bring up your shoulders?  Reference my post on putting stuff over your head: it’s GREAT conditioning.  Legs and posterior chain just write themselves.  Need front squats in your life?  Run my Tower of Babel workout: you’ll HATE front squats.  Wanna spend some time on the Olympic lifts?  “Black and Blue” has got you covered.   I can go on and on here, but you get the point: you can get in that extra work IN conditioning.  It IS the answer. 

 

Say that extra work isn’t conditioning friendly?  You need more band pull aparts or curls or something.  Well, for one, you could always just do like I do and call it “daily work” and just make it something you do every day for submax sets (ANOTHER way to get restorative bloodflow to the muscles) OR you can make THOSE movements the staples of your strength training and then take out some of the big movements to make room, then make those big movements your conditioning so that you don’t miss out.  I took the 3x10 “technique” work out of the Deep Water main workouts and instead included it in a conditioning circuit paired with dips and chins so I could still get in a total of 30 reps (usually done 15-5-10, but I’ve also done 10-5-15 and 12-9-6-3) of work but ALSO get in conditioning.  I wanted to get in SSB squats AND deficit deads on my last training block and I DIDN’T want to take 30 minutes doing it, so I set them both up, hit an EMOM timer, and bounce between one movement and the other for 12 minutes.  At the end of it, I wanted to die…AND I got in 6 sets of SSB squats and deficit axle deadlifts.  Conditioning was, once again, the answer.

Same but different

 

This piece was honestly TOO easy to write, and I could really go on and on about this, but I’m already running longer than usual.  You know conditioning is good, but hopefully you also learned how you can use it outside of simply improving your conditioning.  Bounce back faster AND get in more volume both by improving your ability to recover AND employing conditioning as a means to accumulate volume in and of itself.  I’m getting in at least 448 KB front squats a week ON TOP OF whatever else my training requires of me.  That stuff will make you grow.