We’re entering the summer block’s final training phase. It’s the final phase in the transition from work capacity training to heavy strength and power training.
Monday and Friday: Strength A and Strength B
Yes, Monday and Friday.
If you’re about to ask, “What in the blue blazes is going on here?”
There’s a good reason why we’ve switched Strength B and Resilience, moving Resilience to Wednesday and Strength B to Friday.
That reason is managing training stress.
Eustress training continues. But we’ve progressed from doing straight sets to doing ladders. During weeks one and two, you do a 1, 2, 3 ladder. And during weeks three and four you’ll do a 2,3,4 ladder. It goes a little a sumthin’ like this…
Do 1 rep. Rest until your heart rate is under 130. Do 2 reps with the same weight. Rest until your heart rate is under 130. Do 3 reps with the same weight. Rest until your heart rate is under 130.
That’s one round. You’ll start back at 1 rep and continue on that way for the allotted time.
This training style increases the overall volume of each strength session compared to the last phase. An increase in volume, while maintaining the same intensity, means an increase in training stress. Since each strength day is much more stressful, you’ll need more recovery time between sessions. So, we have to put as much time between them as possible. Bonus: you get a nice, hard training session to close out the week.
The skeleton of each strength session remains the same.
We’re doing swing and get-up practice during Strength A. We’ve added a couple new exercises to help you master the swing.
[here is one of our new additions]
And we’re doing traditional power training during Strength B.
Each session is closed with eight minutes of movement restoration.
Tuesday: Vigor
Repeat power output training continues!
The Vigor session format remains the same. But we’ve increased the work interval and decreased the rest interval.
Rather than bombard you with a bunch of new exercises, we’re keeping the same ones. The goal is to make you as efficient as possible with these exercises before moving on to new ones. This improves your ability to generate, sustain, and repeat power output. Learning new exercises would make you inefficient and work against the current goal, which is to prep you for lots of strength and power training.
And repeat intervals of twenty-seconds work and forty-seconds rest does it.
Wednesday: Resilience
We’re, once again, asking you to do movement capacity drills, carries, and a strength exercise. And, once again, you’ll circuit the movements for eight, rock ‘n roll, minutes.
The reps are going up again. This time around, you’re doing sets of 10-12 reps.
Putting Resilience and Endurance back-to-back offers a mid-week intensity break, allowing you to recover and prep to close the week strong with Strength B.
Of note: we have some unique exercises coming this month for both Resilience and Endurance. Here are a few highlights for Resilience:
Knees Up Rocking:
1/2 Kneeling Hip CARs:
Childs Pose Thread the Needle:
Thursday: Endurance
If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it.
Endurance follows the same outline as last time: cardio machine, running, or jump rope followed by mobility exercises.
But we’ve made a key change this time. We’ve decreased the distance on the cardio machines. Here are two reasons why:
- It’s easier to maintain your heart rate. The longer you persist with one movement, the faster the cardiac creep (consistent raising of heart rate during exercise). Decreasing the distance on the cardio machines makes it easier to keep your heart rate down and in the endurance training zones.
- You’ll get more rounds in with the movement capacity drills. The more movement capacity work you do, the better your joint range of motion and joint health. That’s important for all aspects of life. But it’s especially crucial as we hit the home stretch before a heavy strength and power training block.
Here are a few highlighted new movements for Endurance this time around:
1/2 Kneeling Windshield Wiper:
Single Arm Overhead Rotational Squat:
Plank Walkout:
Okay. You know why you’re doing what you’re doing. Let’s kick ass this month.
