SESSION NOTES: Moderate Barbell Conditioning (429)
Complete as many rounds as possible in six minutes of the following complex at 50% of your max (squat) clean and jerk. The complex must be unbroken.
Power clean, thruster.
Programming Science:
This session contains one element of each of the four major barbell movement types, through a combination of powerlifting and Olympic weightlifting. Movement types include anterior chain (or squat-based), posterior chain (or deadlift/hip hinge), upper body press and upper body pull.
The inclusion of all movement types ensures musculo-skeletal balance, and also creates a ‘blood shunting’ effect, where your body is required to deliver oxygen and fuel, and remove waste, from large and alternating muscle beds.
This session isn’t the most effective method of getting strong, nor is it the best way to build cardiorespiratory endurance, however, it is highly effective at achieving a mix of both in one session as a form of concurrent training. Percentages are programmed rather than weights to ensure the correct stimulus, that both cardiorespiratory endurance and muscle stamina are trained equally.
It trains your ability to lift moderate weights under cardiorespiratory duress.
Effectively, we’re using barbell cycling to achieve cardiorespiratory endurance.
Health and Body Composition Benefits:
This session delivers benefits from both resistance-based training, and cardiorespiratory training.
Resistance training (using your muscles to lift heavy weights, either external weights or yourself) makes you stronger. Strength is one of the greatest predictors of both your lifespan (how long you live) and your healthspan (how long you live in a healthy state).
Resistance training like this will also improve your flexibility (by going through a full range of motion), posture and coordination. It will also build stability around your joints and spine to give you a healthy musculo-skeletal system and reduce joint and back pain.
The session will minimise losses in bone mineral density and will improve your balance. Strength and balance are the two strongest predictors of falls later in life, so this is an effective way to train fall prevention, and insure your independence into old age.
This session increases your lean muscle mass and muscle fibre size. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue, so increasing it will maximise how much energy your body burns at rest. This makes it an effective session to reach healthy levels of body fat, both visceral fat (around the organs) and subcutaneous fat (under your skin). After this session, your body will go through a prolonged state of ‘EPOC’ (excess post- exercise oxygen consumption), meaning you’ll continue burning energy long after you finish training – further aiding healthy body composition.
The cardiorespiratory element of this session also has considerable health benefits, with this session creating favourable changes to cardiovascular disease (including reductions in blood pressure) and respiratory disease. This session will also lower your resting heart rate and increase blood flow to the brain.
As a result of this style of session, you will experience changes in blood chemistry, including favourable effects on cholesterol, blood glucose, triglyceride and lipid levels.
Performance Benefits:
The primary benefit of completing resistance training under cardiorespiratory duress from a performance perspective is to improve the ability of your body to sustain repeated muscle contractions.
This session achieves this by training the glycolytic and oxidative energy systems which generate ‘ATP’ (adenosine triphosphate) which fuels movement. By completing this session and training these energy systems, we’re able to raise the lactate threshold, the intensity at which hydrogen ions begin to accumulate, causing cell acidity. Raising this threshold allows you to exercise at a higher rate for longer, with less fatigue.
As a result of this session, you’ll experience performance-boosting changes in intramuscular substrate storage (increasing energy availability for muscle contractions) and increased enzyme activities (increasing the rate of energy delivery to the muscles).
Additionally, the repetitive muscle contractions create positive changes at a muscular level.
The high repetition movements in this session train the ability of your muscles to resist fatigue – increasing their stamina. This comes from improvements in the efficiency of slow twitch (fatigue resistant) muscle fibres.
As a result of the volume of repetitions, this session will increase the mitochondrial density in your muscle cells, allowing them to more efficiently convert energy into fuel. This means you can sustain higher rates of muscle contraction before fatigue or failure.
The higher volumes will also increase capillary density in your muscles, allowing for efficient delivery of oxygen and fuel, and removal of waste products (further adding to the fatigue resistance).
These muscular changes also occur in the ventilatory muscles, particularly with the need to breath and brace while lifting heavy loads, improving breathing efficiency.
Strategy:
As this is a sustained aerobic effort, you should approach it like you would a run/row/cycle of the same length.
You should be in control of your workrate, rather than the session determining it for you.
Instead of trying to complete a number of unbroken reps of the complex, you should do singles, with (as close as possible to) the same amount of rest between each.
Just like a long run, where you shouldn’t alternate periods of sprint with periods of rest, the focus should be on a consistent pace. Then, towards the end, increase your workrate.
It can be a great idea to use the ‘lap timer’ on your stopwatch – pressing ‘lap’ after each rep. This will allow you to look back and check your pacing.
How it Should Feel:
This should get progressively more difficult as you go, while maintaining the same pace. To achieve this even pace, it will probably need to feel easier than you expect in the first quarter (6/10 exertion), building to a 7/10 in the second quarter, an 8/10 in the third quarter (where it should be uncomfortable and a fight to maintain pace), then 9+/10 towards the end.
Scaling Guidelines:
As this is based on a percentage of your own max, you shouldn’t need to reduce the weights. If you have a low ‘training age’ (haven’t been training for long), you may need to ‘scale up’, increasing the weights to ensure that you’re equally limited by both ‘heaviness’ and ‘breathing’.
Modify around injuries with exercises as close as possible to the stimulus of the movement you’re modifying.
Common Mistakes:
The biggest mistake here is pacing – starting too fast and finishing too slow. Maintain an even pace, building speed towards the end.
Doing unbroken reps is also a danger. Instead, keep your rest between reps the same throughout.
