This week Shaun and Matt discuss the best strategies for building better Endurance and why Strength training should be at the foundation for this…

00:05 Yeah, so I've had a lot of questions recently about... or just people talking about the fact that they don't feel like they've done a workout unless they walk out of the gym dripping in sweat. Or they just love the feeling of laying down exhausted after 30 minutes of a workout. And it has to be a long endurance-y conditioning type piece for them to feel like they've actually gotten something out of their training that day.

06:33 So if you are looking for a way to get fitter faster, yeah, the conditioning thing will give you the short quick fix. But the strength work, you really need to take the long game because it is going to take a long time. You can't just build muscle mass overnight. And in our experience, whether you're at the fitter end or you've just started your journey here with us, the conditioning side can come around very fast. In four weeks from where you were to... For example, say in two minutes you could do 10 burpees when you first started, if you did lots of conditioning workouts for about a period of a month, you'd probably get that up to double that. And that's pure conditioning. It's got nothing to do with really strength.

10:20 I'd actually like to see people shift their mindset about that, I really need to get a good sweat, and replace sweat with the word like effort. You could still do a running session with little effort and still feel really sweaty and exhausted at the end of it, and then if you do that for strength training, of course you're going to feel like you got nothing out of it because you haven't exerted yourself. So I think if you can change the idea behind, I have to sweat to how much effort or exertion I'm putting into a session, then that will hopefully change your mindset around how much work you've got done during that session.

12:53 Most people would think that metabolic conditioning means all right, let's just do cardio. And sure it does help your lifting and stuff like your recovery in between sets to do more cardio stuff, because you're cardio system is your recovery system, as you're recovering between sets and reps. However, if you're starting your fitness journey or starting to go to the gym or whatever, if from day one you always focus on strength and then conditioning was just something that you'd layered in between, and it was this long steady state type cardio, that would be the best approach to getting someone fit. Two to three hard workouts a week that are a bit longer and lighter or harder, I use an inverted commas, and then the majority of the stuff that you do is strength and tempo and pause, back squats and tempo, dead lifts and all this stuff, so you've got more time and attention with your lifting, then that's the angle of the approach that we'd like to see.

23:45 Yeah, so for me it's whether your a beginner athlete or your really experienced with your strength training, I love tempo work because for one, for a beginner, what it's teaching them to do is good movement patterns and it's making them keep a weight that's really low. So there's lower risk for injury, and there's lower risk for doing anything bad, and you are going to make them really sore because their muscles are under tension for so much longer. But that's the beneficial thing there. So time under tension for them, building good movement patterns and also setting really good standards.

32:44 Cardio will get better by being stronger. Doing more cardio will not make you stronger. My biggest takeaway was actually don't be misconceived by what the strength work is you're actually doing. So the fact that you're lifting some five kilo dumbbells 50 times in a workout, that's not strength work. Not to me anyway.