Good Morning Titans,
Yup, you read that right. We have to do conditioning too. I hear far too often that since strongman and powerlifting are sports based on strength rather than aesthetics so we don’t have to do any cardio and can focus solely on building strength, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. No, I’m not just talking about health reasons either. Adding some conditioning into your programming will yield impressive results for your performance as well.
So, what are some of the benefits?
One of the more obvious benefits to having some conditioning in your programming is that it will make you better in many events in strongman. Unlike powerlifting, strongman requires a good deal more than just static strength. Just a few weeks ago at the Swamp Monster Shootout we had two events, the axle clean and press and the stone over bar, that were light for almost every weight class and as a result turned into high rep affairs. For these events, top end static strength didn’t matter as much as your conditioning since we were going all out for a straight minute. Had we been more conditioned a lot of us would’ve performed much better at these two events.
Strongman also has a lot of moving events as well. It’s not uncommon at all to set up on a starting line with three different implements and must carry each one of them 50 feet or more as fast as possible. If your conditioning isn’t on point, then you’re going to have a bad time.
Another important benefit is more apparent when you get to the lower weight classes of both sports. Let’s take strongman’s 231 class for example. Who is going to perform better? The 231 man that has a 30 percent body fat percentage? Or the 228 lbs. man with 7 percent body fat? Pretty sure everyone here knows the answer to that question. So, the moral of the story is that doing your conditioning will help lean you out and therefore make more room on your frame for more muscle. Considering muscle holds more water than fat this means you can also train at a heavier body weight and do a steeper water cut if your competition has 24-hour weigh ins.
One of the most important and often overlooked benefits of adding conditioning to your programming is that it aids in your recovery. Our body uses the aerobic system to recover so when we add a little steady state cardio to the equation then it means our bodies can recover faster from heavy workloads. This means that you can hit heavier percentages more often and get stronger a little faster. This is a benefit that even the super heavy weights can take advantage of.
So, what are some ways we can program conditioning?
The simplest way I’ve found to work some simple steady state cardio into your training is to just sprinkle 10-minute walks throughout the day. This is best done directly after meal times to aid in digestion but I understand that not everyone can do this so the best thing that I’d suggest doing is once when you wake up, once after lunch, and the one more at the beginning of your night time ritual. Doing three of these walks everyday adds another 3 hours and 30 minutes to your conditioning every week.
This is only one part of the equation though. When most of your events don’t last longer than a minute, like in strongman, you need to devote part of your training to very hard short bursts of conditioning. There are a lot of different ways you can accomplish this, so I’ll only speak on a few of them.
Sprints
I’m a big fan of running intervals. If you don’t have any distances marked out, then you can do this very easily by time. I’m a big fan of equal work to equal rest when doing these and I typically do 60:60, 90:90 or 3:30:3:30, If you do this once or twice a week then your aerobic capacity will skyrocket.
Melodies
This one is simple. If you have a melody or stone series in your next competition, then simply practice that melody. Keep the weights light enough that you can move quick and to ensure that your strength isn’t the limiter
Higher rep ranges
For the love of God do more than five reps every once in a while.
The Tabata Protocol
This is one of the most misused forms of conditioning that I’ve ever seen. Often times you see athletes setting up a circuit with several different movements in it (i.e. Tire flips, burpees, battle ropes, power cleans) and doing these events one after another. This is counterproductive to the desired purpose. Instead choose something that requires absolutely no skill that you can put 100 percent output into such as an Air Bike. This will enable you to go all out for the total time of the protocol which is, eight rounds of 20 seconds all out and 10 seconds of rest.
So that’s it for this article. Hopefully you learned something that you can take away and add to your own training to make it better. If you liked it then please check back next week for a new one. You can also follow our Facebook here and our Instagram here. And as always if you have any questions please feel free to shoot me an email at cameron@atlasstrengthshop.com. I’d love to help you add some conditioning to your program.
Release the Titan in You,
Cameron Ray
