I’ve been diving into the evidence on Strength vs Conditioning vs Both for mitigating long-term health conditions and all-cause mortality.
I was recently listening to a few BBM podcasts, where it was discussed that conditioning focused workouts are favorable for individuals with health-related conditions or have goals related to conditioning, but it seems that well programmed strength training can carryover some of the necessary health benefits for longevity (if have attained the base level conditioning needed to decrease those health risks secondary to lack of conditioning, which was thought to be ~ 8 METs). Implying that we get a pretty decent stress from weight training to drive conditioning adaptations that have an effect on clinical outcomes. After attaining that baseline level of conditioning then there may be benefit to adding 1-3 aerobic sessions <30min at ~ RPE 6 for immediate/advanced barbell athletes to improve recovery within strength workouts.
Mandasger et al., 2018 and a few recent articles, showed that there is also a dose-response effect for attaining higher and higher levels of cardiovascular fitness and health improvements (although this is not a linear relationship), which may affect the previous evidence in regards to 8 METs…
What is your more recent general recommendations for incorporating conditioning for the barbell athlete (beginner vs intermediate vs advanced lifter). While this is individualized of course and dependent on goals, is there an upper-limit for the barbell athlete that has been shown to mitigate long-term health problems and all-cause mortality, while also maintaining or improving performance (improving recovery time between sets/reps)? Or should we just do as much as we can while tracking and managing its effects on lifting sessions (probably answered my own question)?
We have detailed our recommendation extensively in the Beginner Template e-book, the free Beginner Prescription text, and a number of other places (e.g. the newsletter) and on this very forum- all serving as an update to our previous answer given during a Q/A in 2017. Here’s one link:
To answer your question about mortality in barbell athletes, there has been no research done into this specific population. That said, we expect the same dose-response relationship we see in non barbell training athletes.