Accommodations for Increasing Conditioning

Training Q&A [Moderated]
1

Do you have a general rule of thumb for how much strength/hypertrophy work to remove from an Rx for a given amount of increased conditioning?

My athletic background is as a semi pro soccer player with a sub 4:30 mile, but who has spent the 20 years since stopping playing focused more on strength and hypertrophy. Most of my training for the last decade or so specifically has been aligned with a power building type approach, including years using your templates, but right now I’m just bored a bit burned out. Some physical (niggles) and life (work sucks) factors means my training isn’t good quality and without the prospect of working towards gains it’s affecting my motivation and showing up in my consistency.

What I’m thinking of doing is condensing the more structured strength and hypertrophy down into fewer days (maybe 2, maybe 3) and filling the other time with high variety conditioning stuff. Met Con style, for lack of better term. Basically do enough stuff that not familiar with that I’m not focused on how it compares to previous performance and just do something fun and challenging for a while. My question is if you have a rule of thumb for how much of the structured strength work you have to take out to accommodate the increase of this sort of work.

FWIW, I’ve downloaded the two week sample of GSCII and that gives a decent insight into how much strength work you think is tolerable/advisable and have to commend you on the quality of your chatbot in guiding these decisions. Its one of the best conversational ones Ive come across.

2

Unforrtunately, I don’t have a heuristic for this. There are some issues with calculating and comparing training loads from RT to AT. While it’s not a bad way to start, it’s still an educated guess.

To your exact question, I wonder if you would have better results if you changed exercises for your program significantly. I suspect that both the niggles and the plateau would be handled this way. I’m not sure if you were planning on replacing the lifting stuff with MetCon/Circuits, or if you were doing that [metcons] for your conditioning. That wouldn’t be my first choice for either if I got to pick. Since adherence via enjoyment is priority #1 however, I’d reserve it for that approach. My main concern with that approach is more of the same, i.e. niggles and lack of progress.

Have you tried the sample week from GSC II? If so, how’d it go?