Most lifting athletes need more conditioning as it is. 2 days a week seperate from lifting should be enough. Sled work, circuits, sprint intervals, sledeghammer, etc… They all work. I also would add drills from Ross Enamait’s site and use them in your strength workouts.
Conditioning has become my #1 priority in training, and has only benefited my lifting!!!
okay…bump and to clear some thins up:
im not looking to lose fat, i just want to have a stronger, healthier, and more efficient cardiovascular system (ie run a mile easily, sprint fast, etc). lewhitehurst: I understand that losing fat would increase my conditioning but im atually trying to put on weight right now so i dont want to drop in a caloric deficit. i still think that people can increase cardio output without having to lose fat. a perfect example is football players or wrestlers, the fat ones, who still have excellent conditioning despite being fat
my goals are moderate enough in my opinion that I don’t need to concentrate on specializing my cardio anaerobic or aerobic. im not looking to run a 5k or run a 4.3 40. like i said above i just want to be “generally fit”. I know its vague but that is the whole point - im not looking to specialize, i just want to increase where I am at a little bit. thus, i dont think avoiding any one type of cardio is beneficial, i think i can benefit from both aerobic and anaerobic cardio. so that is what i will do, of course i wont be running a treadmill for 60 minutes it will be much more moderate. same goes with anaerobic work
thx for all the good input, i think that several of you answered my question so i have nothing further to add. if you want to continue the topic as a general discussion of conditioning and its role in weightlifting that is fine
Conditioning is a relative term. Most people just think of conditioning as anaerobic/aerobic endurance training but it is much more involved than this. Anything we do requires at least some level of “conditioning”. Think about this:
You may be a beast and be able to 1RM 400+ lb on a bench press but it requires a greater capacity of conditioning to do any more reps. Conditioning just refers to the efficiency of our energy systems to perform a given task repeatedly.
On one end of the spectrum we have absolute strength and at the other end of the spectrum we have aerobic endurance. In between there are the other modalities of strength and endurance such as speed and explosive power.
If we think about it like a continuum we can see that as we add resistance (or power output when referring to speed and explosiveness) to a given movement our ability to perform repetitions becomes increasingly less until we come to a 1RM. This is where conditioning comes into play.
Building a high level of conditioning requires every modality of strength to be trained though we can usually only focus on a few modalities at a time. In fact, since many strength athletes are mostly concerned with building 1RMs and not cardiovascular endurance they must take off a few months out of the year to focus on aerobic endurance, for example, just so they can walk up a flight of stairs without getting winded.
Conditioning is a broad term and anything we do to improve performance is considered “conditioning”.