Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning

This post is about the essentials of strength training & conditioning …

Not so much about the exercises or what to do, but the broad strokes of what I think are VERY necessary to pay attention to if you want to build world-class strength and conditioning.

Essential #1: Lift Heavy Stuff Often

Because strength is the basis of all physical skills, it’s super important to lift heavy stuff a lot of the time. While “heavy” is a relatively general term — it means heavy for you.

More specificially, it means lifting stuff that requires you to get and keep maximum tension throughout your musculature involved in the lift. It’s this max tension, or learning how to get your nervous system to “fire” your your muscles harder that builds strength.

So when in doubt, lift some heavy stuff. In the words of a super smart Russian, “Lift as heavy as possible, as often as possible while staying as fresh as possible” to build world-class strength.

Essential #2: Get Outa Breath Often

Nothing is more important for conditioning than to get out of breath. Traditional “cardio” or aerobic exercise is in almost all cases nearly useless for making you a more healthy person.

Instead, do what Dr. Sears recommends and get into what he calls the “Supra-Aerobic” zone:

“Even worse, aerobic training—the kind most doctors and even the federal government tout as the path to good health—can actually wreck your body. Do enough aerobics and it will make you sick, tired and old before your time.

When you exercise aerobically, you have to keep the intensity low enough that you can fuel the activity with oxygen. At this low rate, you have to exercise for long duration for it to do anything. Herein lays both its inadequacy and the reason it will likely cause you problems.

The Harvard Health Professionals Study backs me up on this. Researchers followed over 7,000 people. They found that the key to exercise is NOT length or endurance. It’s intensity. The more intense the exertion, the lower their risk of heart disease.1

High intensity exercise can also help you live longer. Another Harvard study compared vigorous and light exercise.

Those who performed exercise that is more vigorous had a lower risk of death than those who performed less vigorous exercise.2

Aerobics is a low-intensity, long-duration exercise. The Harvard study clearly shows that this kind of exercise increases your risk of heart disease and death.

And here’s why: When you exercise for long periods at a low to medium intensity, you train your heart and lungs to get smaller!”

And in case you’re wondering, yes, high-intensity exercise is also the best for conditioning for sports. When was the last time you “paced” yourself running down the soccer field, exploding at someone in football, wrestling, boxing, or any other sport?

NEVER!

You always, always have short bursts of intense exercise in any sport … usually followed by a moderate level of activity. Train that way.

Essential #3: Challenge Yourself & Get Mentally Tough

This is really one of the keys to getting “World-Class” strength and conditioning. The truth is: to get all the health benefits of exercise you really don’t need to do that much.

BUT … the payoff for challenging yourself in the gym is a stronger mind. A stronger sense of confidence. And the ability to set and achieve goals. And that’s worth all the pain and struggle in the world.

So treat your strength & conditioning as a practice each time. It’s truly self improvement and development. You’ll become a stronger, more confident, more driven person if you refuse to back down and challenge yourself daily.

These three things are pretty much what I would consider the essentials of strength training and conditioning.