Minimum cardio related with the templates

Hi coaches,

I have pretty much most of your templates.

As far as I know minimum cardio should be 150 min (when moderate).

But most of the templates have 4 x 30min zone 2 maximum which lacks 30 min.

So my question is that is lacking 30 min intended cause we do cardio in life like walking, moving, etc?

Or can I do 5 x 30 min zone 2 (I’m on BB II currently)?

Thanks!

Good question. I’ll try and be brief.

The guideline minimums are as you stated, e.g. 150-min/wk moderate or 75 min/wk vigorous, or some combination of the two in order to reach 500-1000 MET-minutes per week.

Most of our templates meet or exceed the latter (MET-min/wk) target, though I don’t like METs or MET-min for prescriptive purposes. I also would generally prefer most people to perform more conditioning, though I don’t think most of our template users are endurance-focused individuals and/or have an extensive endurance history. Rather, most are looking to get strong, gain size, power, and so on. So, most of the conditioning recommendations on our strength/size focused programs are on the conservative side with respect to volume (minutes/wk), though I think the training load for most of our templates meets the minimum prescription without drastically increasing the risk of overuse.

I don’t have an issue with you doing an additional 30-minutes of conditioning per week, as I suspect this would be well tolerated, especially if you’re a few weeks deep into the program and doing fine.

-Jordan