[quote]Clutch wrote:
Hey Glenn,
Besides diet & strength training, do you have any “favorite” conditioning methods you like to use with your athletes that need to drop some fat/improve conditioning?
Thanks for all the advice you’ve been providing.
Cheers
Clutch[/quote]
That depends very much on the athlete and situation. If it was a kid like Jon North, who already trains 2-3 times a day, is lean enough to have veins in his lower abs, etc, if for some strange reason we wanted him to move down a weight class it would be totally a matter of diet. His normal training, which I have described fairly well in several threads here in CT’s forum, is already about as much “conditioning” as he can take.
If its a 12 year old beginner that has taken up weightlifting and is out of shape, then the conditioning is going to be aimed at whatever weakness the kid has. I have a new kid right now named Andrew. Andrew has developed a good feel for the bar and pretty good technique over the last month but he has a lot of excess mobility in his shoulders and poor control of the bar when its over his head because of that and because of a complete lack of muscle in his upper back. So he does 3 sessions a week of kettlebell snatches. He is already skinny so we dont go overboard, but a 10 minute session of snatching with a KB helps to build the upper back, gets him better at stabilizing a weight overhead, and builds his capacity to handle more training.
A completely different situation would be NFL combine prep. Because of the demands of the combine and the demands of that particular game, almost all “conditioning” is going to be done on your feet and focused on moving around. Repeated effort sprinting, lateral movement drills, pulling a sled, pushing a prowler, the death march, etc.
A wrestler or MMA guy is a third situation… for that guy I favor more variety, lots of variety actually. But rope climbs, KB work (swings, snatches, and clean and jerks), sandbag work, and the death march are favorites.
As far as intensity and duration, I try to make it fit the sport. With our NFL combine guys this year, we never did any sort of continuous effort stuff, it was all high intensity for 5-15 seconds then rest and repeat. This proved pretty successful. With a wrestler or fighter, we are gonna use 5 and 10 minute sessions. With a young Olympic lifter, we are gonna do everything in such a way as to address any weakness he or she has in attaining or holding the positions that are previous to that sport, as well as some plyo or jumping work.
Hope that answers your question…