If your strength is stalling or if you feel excessive fatigue, how do you tell if you might have stalled because you’re doing more conditioning training than you’re currently able to tolerate?
I’m asking because I’ve slowly increased my conditioning work and a typical week includes:
Cycling for 100+ kilometers, often with loads from groceries or errands in saddle bags or a trailer. (I included some photos.)
1 to 2 four-minute intervals per day on a Rogue Echo bike.
Any additional GPP as prescribed by a program. Please let me share my understanding of what you’d recommend: (I apologize for the length, I’m just trying to save you time in responding.):
If you’ve been doing your current level of conditioning activity for a while, then you’ve probably already adapted to it and it won’t interfere with your weight training or recovery.
To minimize interference, do your conditioning work after your weight training, not before.
Can you do too much conditioning? We’d say:
Many people are undertrained so we generally recommend more physical activity for health and conditioning.
Gradually increase your conditioning work over time to give your body time to adapt to the increased stress.
You probably can’t simultaneously be both the strongest and most conditioned version of yourself. If you’re interested in both strength and conditioning, it’s probably best to rotate between programming templates for strength and conditioning.
If you’re primarily interested in strength and hypertrophy, and simply enjoy riding your bike for errands instead of using your car, and you also do a couple of Echo bike intervals per day, this probably won’t hurt strength or hypertrophy if you’re already adapted to it. In fact, your improved conditioning may help your work capacity for weight training.
Prioritize your goals: You don’t see Strongman competitors cycling with Tour De France cyclists, and you don’t see the latter doing Yoke walks. But let’s not worry about getting so fit that we’ll compromise our ability to carry muscle mass.
If you do stall or feel excessive fatigue, consider: 1) a programming adjustment 2) reducing RPE or volume on either weights or conditioning 3) doing a low-stress week and 4) aiding recovery with adequate calories and protein, sleep hygiene and stress management.
FYI: I resumed “serious” weight training in the last 2 months after getting an R3 rack again. I’m regaining strength while doing your Bridge 1.0 program and I’m hoping to invest in several of your templates in November. Thank you!
Glad to hear about all of your training, and it does seem like you’ve learned a lot around here.
If your strength is stalling or if you feel excessive fatigue, how do you tell if you might have stalled because you’re doing more conditioning training than you’re currently able to tolerate?
You would determine this by altering the dose of conditioning work you’re doing, and seeing how you feel/respond.
If you do stall or feel excessive fatigue, consider: 1) a programming adjustment 2) reducing RPE or volume on either weights or conditioning 3) doing a low-stress week and 4) aiding recovery with adequate calories and protein, sleep hygiene and stress management.
These are also reasonable options in the context of excessive fatigue, although adjusting these factors won’t help you with your original question of whether the conditioning work is excessive.
Thanks Austin, I believe you’re saying that a stall or fatigue might not be due to excessive conditioning work, but could be caused by any number of factors like your programming, or using excessive rpe, poor sleep, etc.? That makes sense.
If you increase your conditioning work gradually rather than rapidly, would any subsequent stalls or fatigue likely be attributable to something other than your conditioning work?
In other words, don’t worry about doing “too much” conditioning work, provided that you’re increasing your overall dosage of stress (from all sources – weight training, gpp, environment) – at only a modest and gradual rate?
There are a lot of variables that impact fatigue, recovery, and performance. Always hard to isolate one.
Not necessarily – even with gradual increases, it’s certainly possible to hit a point where the conditioning work can negatively impact performance in other areas. But again, there are almost always multiple variables at play. Sometimes you might be gradually increasing conditioning volume, then a major life stressor impacts things negatively, or some poor sleep, or simple / routine fluctuations in performance that aren’t clearly attributable to anything at all that pass with time … or, still possible, is that the conditioning volume has gotten to be too high when paired with all the other variables at that moment. The only way to sort this stuff out is through experimentation and time.