In today's episode, we're covering simple strength & conditioning tips and considerations like muscular biases, cardio and lifting, menstrual cycle, limiting factors and more.

Today’s episode is brought to you by 8+ years of personal strength and hypertrophy training, trial and error, and 7+ years of working with clients in person as well as online.

Let’s go ahead and get started with one of my favorite tricks of the trade for super setting exercises.

How to work the same muscle group but lower the cardio-respiratory demand

If we know anything about the cardiovascular system it’s when we lay down or go upside down, the heart rate drops. When we stand up, it tends to rise. Of course there are situational factors at play.

So if you’re wanting to work on strength, but you have a client, or yourself, who is rather de-conditioned. Their wind, or cardio respiratory system is their limiting factor in comparison to their strength. We can play off of that knowledge and lower the intensity of one exercise by choosing a variation that is either laying down, or supported in someway.

For instance, a barbell inverted row vs bent over row. I would hypothesize, the heart rate would be lower during the barbell inverted row than a bent over barbell row. In the bent over row, you are standing, and the load extends from the upper back through to the lower back, into the glutes and hamstrings. Where is the inverted rope is going to mostly tax the upper back. Both exercise target the upper back as the prime movers, one allows you to lower the intensity of the movement.

Same goes for choosing a glute focused exercise to pair with a Romanian deadlift.

A lying single leg bridge would be a fantastic option in order to still target the glutes, but keep the heart rate from continuing to rise.

Smaller muscle groups, and supine or supported positions or some thing to think about in your future programming. Again, that’s just one way to still target the desired muscle group, but maybe keep the cardio respiratory demand down. If that happens to be a mothering factor for yourself or a client.

You can of course tax the cardio respiratory system or work on capacity if that is in fact, factor.

That takes us nicely into the next topic. I talked about this in previous episodes, on the blog, and on Instagram.

Cardio before or after lifting

The answer is, it depends. Generally speaking, if strength training is the primary focus we would want to prioritize, and perform cardio or more conditioning base work after the strength training session is complete.

If conditioning is the primary focus, and the strength training is in support of the conditioning, then you would perform the cardio activities first, and follow those up with the strength training or resistance training session.

You essentially want to make sure that the primary focus of your training is not being hindered by the other portion of your training. Whether that be resistance training or cardio.

Also, cardio is not going to inherently ruin your strength gains, or hypertrophy. In fact one of the other points we will talk about today are the benefits that are possible for it’s an hypertrophy training from low intensity steady state cardio.

In present day, we can look at CrossFit athletes is a perfect example of this. They’ve pretty much squashed the idea that you can’t be strong and powerful and have a strong aerobic base at the same time. And be training BOTH of these in the same season.