Cardio/conditioning durring the bridge.

A few months ago i considered trying “The Bridge” but it wasn’t the right time for me because I didn’t have the experience with variations, or working at various distances to failure. Now that I’ve been on my own program for a few months (and seen reasonable results) I think I might try The Bridge in the new year (Probably don’t want to start a strictly writen program if i’ll be missing days for family holidays.). Over the next couple months, I might try to establish some training maxs on the variations to give me a better idea of what wieghts to use.

So anyway. One of the goals of my program was to lose weight and another goal was to improve cardio/conditioning. To that end I decided to work up to running 15 miles per week, including distance work and speed work. Reading the Bridge E-Boook, it says that the assumption of the Bridge is that Cardio/condition has not been done before… Would it be reasonable for me to continue my running, or would it be more appropriate to quite the running and do the program “as written” in that regard.

First off, you don’t need experience with variations or training “at various distances to failure” to run the bridge. Part of the point of the bridge is to learn these things. I definitely would not start maxing out on variations. That is totally not needed and not recommended. When you train with RPE on a new variation for the first time you simply warmup with the rep scheme and keep adding weight until you hit the desired RPE for the first set. Easy. This is one of the benefits of training with RPE, is that you don’t need to have any prior history with a lift in order to show up day 1 and do it.

As for the running… in order to answer your question accurately I need to know a bit more info: why exactly are you running? Do you care specifically about improving running? Like competing in a race, or just a general love of running? Or do you just do it for general conditioning purposes? Do you have any specific running goals that are important to you? Is strength or running a bigger priority to you? And how big of a priority is the more important one over the lesser important one? Is there a specific reason you chose 15 miles per week? How many days do you typically run and what do your current running sessions exactly look like?

Well, is your primary goal still to lose weight and have high conditioning? Or are you looking for a strength-oriented focus? How many days per week do you currently run / do cardio? In general, BBM advocates doing cardio 2x/week for about 30 minutes per session. I believe The Bridge slowly ramps up to that approach over the 8 weeks, but you could do that right from the get-go given your already proficient at it. If losing weight or conditioning are a high priority to you, you could do more than what BBM prescribes, but it’ll be unknown how that will impact your strength and hypertrophy results.

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