I have tried at various times during 2009 to introduce some “extra workouts” into my week. During the year, I have tried using sandbags, circuits, complexes, strongman exercises and assistance workouts.
One of the concepts I keep coming back to, though, is cardio strength training.
What is cardio strength training?
The best explanation of cardio strength training, or hybrid muscle training, that I have read is Do You Have to Be Fat to Be Strong? by Mike Westerdal of Critical Bench. Mike notes in his article that there has been a sea change recently. It used to be the case that the mental picture people had of a powerlifter was a big fat guy with a goatee, shoe-horned into a pair of indecently tight squat briefs. Nowadays, lots of powerlifters look more like bodybuilders, with low body-fat and visible abs.
Powerlifters are using additional cardio strength workouts to help them reduce body-fat, while increasing strength. They typically use strongman type exercises like farmers’ walks, wheelbarrow walks, sandbag carrying and yoke walks but basically, anything goes as long as it is resistance based and hits the right movement patterns.
It sounds a lot like the GPP that Louie Simmons of Westside Barbell has always talked about.
What does a cardio strength training programme look like?
According to Mike, in a good cardio strength (or hybrid muscle) programme, you do 10-30 minutes of (fairly) continuous strength exercises with little or no rest. After getting up to 30 minutes, you increase the intensity and work back up.
My experimental routine
I have put together a routine that I am going to try out. I am aiming to achieve two things with this programme:
- Goal one: keep body fat at bay while I increase the calories to make the most of the winter bulking phase; and
- Goal two: increase the amount of corrective exercise that I do.
It’s based on supersetting two exercises for time with a short rest between each exercise. Each exercise is done for 45s and I start each exercise on a minute. So I get about 15s rest as I switch between them. So far, I’ve been doing 3-5 sets of each superset. So that takes 5 minutes per superset. I’ll probably build up to 30 minutes before increasing the amount of resistance I am using.
- Superset one: press up and inverted row
- Superset two: pistol and single-leg deadlift
- Superset three: face pulls and rear delt flyes (easy, I know, but I need the corrective work)
- Superset four: step ups and reverse lunges (as an ex-swimmer these are actually quite challenging. I am about as useful as a penguin on land).
Goal one: keep body fat at bay
Well, this one’s hard to see before it happens but I hope that by increasing the volume of resistance work I do in a given week, I should see some improvement here. I just need to make sure I don’t overdo things and get burned out. Ultimately, I would rather gain strength and end up a bit fat. I can deal with the fat when the summer comes around. It’s a lot harder to deal with being weak…
Goal two: corrective exercise
You’ll note that I’m getting quite a lot of scapular retraction here (press ups, inverted rows, face pulls, rear delt flyes) as well as some glute activation (pistols, single-leg deadlift, step ups and reverse lunges). So I’m fairly happy that the programme will help to contribute to goal two.
Well, that’s the outline of my experiment. I’ll give it a try during January and let you know how I get on.
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[...] Recently, after reading an article by Mike Westerdal of Critical Bench on Elite FTS, I wrote a cardio strength programme. A while back, I did a post on eight of the most interesting ways to do cardio. So it would be [...]