Phase 3 Day 37

Conditioning

Long Duration Intervals

1a.
Sled x 5 minutes
Sled x 5 minutes
sled x 5 minutes

1b.
Kettlebell x 5 minutes
Kettlebell x 5 minutes
Kettlebell x 5 minutes

Moderate-Sustained Intensity Hill Runs
20 minutes

Notes
I've been deep-diving into energy systems lately. I'm of the opinion that 95% of the general strength and conditioning crowd gives absolutely zero thought as to the structure of their conditioning.  I used to be one of those people, but I'm trying to rectify that.

My conditioning has basically consisted of going out and blasted my guts out with high threshold work. I've done that for years.  What has that accomplished?  Well, thats given me the VO2Max of a legit long distance runner... minus all of the actual aerobic capacity that goes along with it.   Essentially, my conditioning has been mimicking high-rep threshold sets in the gym.  Anaerobic work baby.  The lactic system.

By training this genre of energy systems, 10-60 seconds, I've developed the ability to perform very high rep (relatively speaking) high intensity sets.  Balls to the wall.  I guess thats cool and all, except that its mostly worthless when it comes to structured training program.  That kind of shit is hard to do consistently, and in my opinion, the actual stimulus achieved is negligible as compared to the demand placed on recovery.  Its like stuffing a canon with a cork and then lighting the fuse.  You get an awesome explosion, but then you are left with a fucked up canon you need to fix.

I'm writing for myself right now, and maybe I'll do an actual energy systems post later on (I still need to write about my V02Max testing), but what I'm saying is that the aerobic system is much easier to train.  And it is low hanging fruit. Relatively speaking, it is easy as fuck to develop the aerobic system to an intermediate level.  It just takes time and discipline.  The discipline being that you have to keep things moderate to actually train your heart in the right manner.

High intensity work (and weightlifting) thickens the walls of the left ventricle.  Thicker = stronger.  Weightlifting enables the heart to pump blood more forcefully.  That is great. But what if you widen the spicket and pump it faster?  Aerobic training widens the spicket.  It increases the space within the left ventricle.  More space = More blood = better chance of oxygen getting to muscle.

This shit is actually relative when it comes to weightlifting, but its time to go to bed.  Hint: GPP.  What I'm finally realizing is that GPP has absolutely nothing to do with 15 second sled sprints.