Forgive me if you’ve answered this somewhere else. I’ve read your article on conditioning. I totally get the idea that the amount of conditioning to do is the minimum to hit your goals. But I
still have some questions on how to program and progress. I’m 51 years old and have put on a ton of fat the last year or two (wife had twins, death in the family, massive job stress, etc). For strength training, I’m running a 4day/week body part split, and have had decent gains, but I let my diet get out of hand and have de-emphasized conditioning. Got back into doing HIIT a couple months ago. My initial goal was to get up to 8 all-out segments and I just hit that. I do my conditioning on lower body days (or occasionally the day after). My diet is getting back into order and now I want to figure out how to best move forward. I do best with structured programs and clear goals.
I go to a globo-gym and do not have access to a prowler.
Current Program - did this the last 2 weeks.
1st leg day: C2 Rower. :30/1:30x8. Work sets always all out.
2nd leg day. fan bike. :15/:45x8. Work sets always all out.
Should I add reps and take it up to 10 rounds? Should I move to 2:1 rest/work?
Current goals are fat loss & general conditioning. I KNOW diet is the key here, but I still want to keep improving my conditioning. Any thoughts here? Available equipment is the flywheel assault bike, C2 Rower, treadmills, etc.
Thank you. If this is answered somewhere else, please just direct me
I think for weight loss the diet is going to be important.
From a conditioning perspective, I think you’re leaving your aerobic fitness undertrained. I would do at least one moderate intensity steady state cardio session, e.g. 30 min @ RPE 6-7, per week.
I do not think the 15:45 session is doing much for you. I would drop kick it in place of the steady state session and you can add time to that every few weeks.
If you want to do another conditioning day, I’d do aerobic intervals where you’re doing 2-4 min efforts @ RPE 8 or so, rest for 2 minutes, and then repeat. Start at 20 minutes total and go up from there.
Are you recommending 3 conditioning days?:
A) LISS (RPE 6/7) for 30 mins
B) Rower :30/1:30
Possibly C) 2-4 minute intervals at RPE 8?
Its pretty interesting that you are de-emphasizing HIIT.
I used to run two 5ks and one 10k a week while doing a HLM program the other 3 days. If I’m able to work back up to that (over 5-6 months or so) should I consider that or is that a ton of overkill?
I’d like to replace HIIT with LISS to have 2x/wk LISS for compliance reasons (don’t like HIIT).
Is HIIT more specific to resistance training and therefore does it carry over better to doing longer sets on the main lifts? I do get out of breath on 6 reps of DL and my limit on myoreps using the HBBS is my breathing and not my legs, I feel (I switched to leg press).
Just want to make sure I fully understand what I could miss out on by avoiding HIIT.