 Joel YounkinsPhysical Preparation Coach For some reason when people think of conditioning, they like to refer to it as "cardio" and the main focus of this cardio exercise always seems to be surrounded by its benefits/discussion to fat loss. Conditioning/aerobic training/"cardio" can be a way to burn body fat, especially if you have a lot to lose or you possess low levels of fitness. But, once you've established a baseline level of fitness, its main benefit actually isn't fat loss at all. When it comes to conditioning, your body adapts to it pretty fast (which means you can lose the progress fast too). When you adapt to it, it means you become more efficient at doing it. Which means you use less energy to do a specific amount of work. When you get efficient at it, you're body will burn less body fat. So you either have to do a lot more of it (equals more time), do it a faster pace (make it harder), or you have to switch how you perform your conditioning (example: cycling to running). So, if you're using your "cardio training" as a means for fat loss, it will be very short lived and then become not a very effective way to metabolically to burn fat. It becomes this game of more burned energy versus caloric intake, and that is a tough game to play and maintain long term unless you decide to transform into a competitive endurance athlete. Now that we got all that out of the way, lets get down to business and discuss what conditioning's main benefit to the body really is... Heart health/performance, blood flow circulation, and work capacity are the main benefits to conditioning work. These are the main purposes, to make the heart stronger to pump more blood more efficiently, increase your blood flow network in your body, and allow you to perform more work in less time. You develop higher/better levels of energy in your body! This is the true essence of conditioning. It's becoming a more efficient human being on how we produce our energy. To further the discussion of actual conditioning on a much larger global scale, person to person, goal to goal, sport to sport, we can really get into the weeds fast as many different elements make up proper conditioning. We can also break down the energy systems in your body that are responsible for creating energy at a cellular level. But I will spare you all that boring science stuff for now, but I encourage you to look into energy systems if you find this particularly interesting. So in this blog, I want to talk specifically about your aerobic system. As this is a system we can all benefit from, as a means for human survival and to improve human performance. The aerobic system is your energy system that relies on oxygen to create and produce energy. It's what is responsible for keeping you going right now while you read this and while exercising for hours on end. Everything that we do as humans, sleep, walk, talk, jog, play a sport, there's always an aerobic component to it. That's why I know, if you improve this system, it will make you perform better at whatever it is that you do! Lets talk about how we improve this thing called your aerobic system that exists inside of your body. The aerobic system actually has a couple different levels to it itself, like aerobic capacity (how much you can do), aerobic power (how strong your heart is at pumping blood), VO2 Max (the amount of oxygen you can bring into your body and use), to your anaerobic threshold (the heart rate at which you no longer use oxygen as its primary fuel source). But to keep things simple for the sake of this blog, we're going to focus on aerobic capacity, as it will serve a larger purpose for most people. Aerobic capacity is about building up efficiency in your heart to be able to pump more blood, more efficiently at a given work load. It will also be responsible for building up a blood flow network in your body so blood flows to your working muscles and back to your heart better. This in return, allows you to do more work and recovery faster when you have a higher level of aerobic capacity. If this is all sounds good, it's because it is good! The challenge to this, is planning it all accordingly. Because it does require time (see below) to get the most out of this training. So in order to do this, you have to allocate time, energy, and overall volume to fit into other fitness goals that you may have. For example, if you're a competitive powerlifter, you can't spend all of your time doing aerobic work building up work capacity. You have to spend more overall time preparing to Squat, Bench, and Deadlift even though you see benefits to having a good level of aerobic capacity. If you don't, you will not perform very well in your competitions. So you have to be able to do enough aerobic work to get benefits from it without taking away from the main goal which in this case is the sport of powerlifting. Again, we can keep going all day with this stuff, but to leave you with some good information, I'll list criteria below to take action steps to start improving your conditioning (specifically aerobic capacity and not "cardio"). Start building your aerobic capacity with these guidelines below.
When you're ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:
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