Hi all,
I’m a 32 years old male that played Basketball throughout his life in a decent level club in Italy. I am not a professional player, but the trainings are performed at a fairly high level for 3 days a week + 1 game night per week. Training usually last 90 to 120 minutes, of which at least 60 minutes include high intensity cardio (either intense technique exercises or full court games). I have never actually dedicated much time to strength training, but I in the past couple of years I started to develop an interest in the discipline. I started during the Covid pandemic to train at home with elastic bands, then gradually started adding free weights. Once I started I fell in love with the overall process of lifting weights and get stronger.
Recently I began the Beginner’s Template program and I pretty much followed it strictly. The only difference between what I do and the actual program is that I always alternate training days and rest days without ever having two rest days in a row (e.g., if I started my training week on Monday, I would then train Wednesday and Friday and start the next training week on Sunday, etc.). I’ve already completed 8 weeks of the Phase I of the program and I still see some progress being made with my lifts.
The only doubts I have are connected to the conditioning portion of the program. I should be doing 30 minutes of cardio work at 6/7 RPE for 2 times a week. I’m not really good at judging RPE for cardio and I choose to stick to hearth rate zones, which I had already been using in the past for my basketball conditioning. In those 8 weeks I have been aiming at zone 3/4 for my cardio sessions (between 135 and 150 bpm) and I didn’t have too many issues in the first month or so. However, in the past few weeks, I am noticing that my body is becoming a bit tired between the cardio training from the Template and the one I am getting on the court (I also went on a slight caloric deficit of about ~300 calories per day in order to lose a couple of kgs of body fat).
I wonder if I am keeping the intensity too high on my LISS cardio sessions (thus I should aim for zone 2/3 cardio instead of 3/4) or if I am actually doing too much cardio altogether, i.e., I should aim for just one day of LISS (I’d still like to keep at least one day, since basketball is mostly providing me with high intensity cardio). Alternatively, if all is fine, I wonder if the tiredness would simply go away with time and it is just a matter of letting my body get accustomed to the increased number of conditioning training days.
Thanks in advance for the eventual response.
All the best,
Mirko