Work Harder, Rest Longer for Smarter Circuits
Work Harder, Rest Longer for Smarter Circuits
Want to to improve your conditioning, get stronger and not feel like you’re gonna die in the process?
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Give anti-glycolytic training a try for a more intelligent approach to interval training. The internet is rife with coaches showing metabolic circuits with long work intervals and negative or non-existent rest periods. While this stuff may look cool, make you tired and be really hard it’s not the best approach to develop repeatable high intensity capacity or long-term sustainability.
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Long work periods with negative rest (think :45-1:00 on/:15-:30 off) essentially train you to work at medium effort all the time because the work/rest balance isn’t one that allows for high intensity and repeatability. This limits your top end potential and forces us to work primarily via lactic metabolism. Not ideal for either power of sustainability.
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A better idea would be to train with shorter, higher intensity efforts with semi-complete recovery for a high number of rounds. This is akin to a series of full effort sprints with rest in between as a oppose to continual medium effort jogging with the previous mentioned approach.
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The example in the video was as follows:
KB Swing x 20 seconds
Recover to 70%
Push-Up x 20 seconds
Recover to 70%
Inverted Row x 20 seconds
Repeat 8 rounds
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Working in this fashion allowed me to maintain movement quality and power output throughout the entire workout while training both my AP-PC System and Aerobic Recovery. Don’t just do a bunch of exercises to make yourself tired. Plan your work/rest periods intelligently!