Generally, strength and conditioning refers to exercise of different intensities and modalities with a variety of equipment aimed at a variety of fitness, performance, and body composition goals. The term, strength and conditioning, encompasses all the different types of ways you can train at high and low intensities. The transition is that you work your way up to high intensity exercising from low intensity workouts.
You condition your body workout after workout to use heavier weights, work out longer, and ultimately work out harder. And this translates into all kinds of exercises : running, biking, lifting weights, swimming, and body weight exercising. So the main goal of strength and conditioning is ot build towards high intensity exercise with various exercise modalities.
The result is increased strength qualities (strength endurance, absolute strength, anaerobic strength, aerobic and anaerobic cardio fitness). And this would help you lose more fat nad build more muscle. If you improve your conditioning, you're able to take advantage of oxygen-debt HIIT for more fat loss. You're able to handle heavier wieghts and work each muscle more often to create more microtrauma, more hypertrophy with an increased work capacity. So these fitness benefits are compounded as you see the value in strength and conditioning training.
So strength and conditioning is really a total approach to training where the ultimate goal is toget fitter and in better shape, lose fat, build muscle, and ultimately change the way you look physically and your outlook on the fitness lifestyle. It's also a more fun way of training. You don't have to stick to one type of exercise. There's no rule that says you must do this or do that to lose fat and build muscle.
For athletes, they may use sports-specific strength and conditioning workouts to be more explosive and get stronger. For boxers, they will use intervals in their boxing drills and speed work to mimic real life boxing fight. Ask any fighter or combat athlete when they lost what was one of their top reasons and they'd replied wishing they had more conditioning to last through the fight.
For example, a boxer who fights in 3 minute rounds will use 3 minute intervals in his training to match the intensity and time of the fight. He could combine a series of punch-out bag drills, body weight explosive exercises, jumping rope, and running to train various aspects of strength and conditioning to get ready for his fight. The workout, which combines sports-specific skill training with non-sports training, would look something like this,
punch-out bag drills for 30 seconds, do high speed punches all out for 30 seconds without resting, mix in straight punches, jabs, and hooks,
then rest 30 seconds,
repeat the bag drill 6 times, total of 3 minutes
burpees 10 reps, rest 30 seconds, repeat 4 times, rest 1 minute,then
go out and run a half mile as fast as you an
Each phase of this strength and conditioning workout takes approximately 3 minutes to complete, 3 minute intervals. These workouts are short but intense. The above workout should take you no longer than 12 minutes to finish.
And if you're ever bored of your current workouts, dig into the strength and conditioning arsenal and find some other types of workouts and exercises you may like. You can train to lose fat. You can build muscle without using conventional weights.
insert video of s and c workout
There are 3 general formats for a strength and conditioning workout,
1) Intervals
2) General Physical Preparedness, GPP
3) Density
In the next article, we'll take a look at what exercises are involved in each format, some examples of strength and conditioning workouts and how you can come up with your own strength and conditioning routines.
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