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132 The Conditioning Biased Athlete
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Join us for the live training: Conditioning for Fitness Athletes.
Thursday, October 23rd, 3pm MT
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When I start working with a new athlete, the first question we ask is:
"What are our training priorities?"
To help decide, we look at their:
- Competition results
- Training metrics
- Physical characteristics
Elite fitness athletes often have exceptional strength and muscle mass talent.
As a result, the majority of people who want to compete in fitness sport spend their entire career chasing strength.
They may condition, but in amounts that still let them make meaningful gains in their strength and muscle mass.
But a few athletes who have exceptional strength and muscle mass talent must focus on their conditioning.
How do conditioning-biased athletes train?
Most of my conditioning-biased athletes condition 6 days a week, with their quality sessions confined to 3 of those days.
A quality session is any session that includes medium or high intensity exercise. All other conditioning is done at a low intensity.
The goal, in the long term, is to chronically increase training load.
This can come in one of two ways:
- Improved fitness - as you become more conditioned, you can sustain higher relative intensities, so you can achieve larger training loads in the same amount of time
- Adding hours - usually in the form of more low intensity training. For context, Olympic endurance athletes condition for ~15-25 hours per week, the vast majority of it at a low intensity.
All else being equal, if you become more aerobically fit, you can recover faster from all types of exercise.
A Note on Nutrition
Depletion is extremely common among fitness athletes.
I know it was for me when I was competing.
I had a whole food bias, so I thought that the only carbs I could eat were from rice, oats or fruit.
I simply couldn't eat enough whole food to meet my energy needs.
As a result, by the third event of a multiday competition, I was wiped out.
If you're training with a conditioning-bias, preparing for a multiday competition, or competing in one, your carbohydrate needs range from 6-12 g/kg per day.
In most cases, this will include some processed foods.
This is because processing usually makes food more condensed. So the food takes up less volume in your GI system.
Here are a couple examples:
50g Carbs = 200g White Rice vs. 60g Rice Chex Cereal
50g Protein = 200g Sirloin Steak vs. 75g Whey Protein
Here are condensed foods I use myself and with my athletes to help them meet their energy needs:
- Baby food (fruit and vegetable puree)
- Energy waffles
- Cereal
- Gummies
- Karbolyn
- Cyclic Dextrin
- Egg White Protein
- Whey Protein
As you get more fit and your training load increases, so will your energy expenditure. Use these guidelines to help you fuel your training.
Resources
[1] Physical and Physiological Characteristics of Elite CrossFit Athletes
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4663/12/6/162
[2] FFMI Calculator: calculate your genetic muscular potential
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