A Workout To Try

Here’s an interesting workout I did the other day and something you might want to try. It combines both conditioning and heavy work, because let’s face it that’s what we’re all after. Conditioned strength. This one borrows some of the rep schemes that Cross Fit likes to use and then uses it as a pre-exhaustion to heavy lifting.

In the beginning workouts like this might take away from what you can lift, because your body needs to build the ability to handle the workload and still be strong at the end, but after you get used to it, you’ll find that you’re stronger when you go back to a regular workout set up.

So here it is:

Bent over row, push up, kettlebell swing, bodyweight squat, tuck jump for three circuits of 21, 15 and 9 reps. Try to compete the conditioning part in 10 minutes. Then you get a five minute rest and perform four sets of one rep each of squats, rows and one arm presses. If you prefer different heavy exercises it doesn’t really matter if you want to use partial squats or deadlifts, any other press or pull. The point is to make yourself breath hard and then start the heavy work. You should get the heavy work down in 15 total minutes.

When you get into good condition or you get used to a workout like this, you’ll find that your strength can be maintained because you’ve already worked your endurance and that is the point. Many of the programs miss today that you should have both over the top strength and the ability to maintain it in an endurance environment. The only way to get that is to work it. That means heavy lifting, overloading exercises, intense endurance work that involves both muscular and aerobic work and rotating the order of your workouts so that your body becomes accustomed to maintaining its strength regardless of your environment.