Conditioning and Aerobic Front-Loading

Conditioning is important for a couple of reasons. Number one, you need to get in shape to be able to train hard in the gym and recover hard. You need to keep your blood pressure regulated, your heart rate regulated, HRV regulated. But then once all that's good, we don't need to do we don't need to flog that horse anymore. You need to take all of that effort. Let's put it to the lifting instead. And then we can always bring the conditioning back in if we're at a level where the calories are low and we don't feel comfortable taking any more calories out. and now we need to create a caloric funnel. But a lot of people leave the conditioning in too long and they end up just looking stringy and gross. And they're leveraging that instead of leveraging a caloric deficit and lots of rest and sleep. So I think a lot of this stuff, it's a lot of the way you design programs too. You've got to look at what's the end goal, where are we beginning? What are the gaps I need to fill in to then compound all that? it's like compounding interest and it's like having stocks, you know, you buy 25 different stocks. Some stocks don't work. The majority of them do great. Your portfolio goes up. It's, it's the same type of thing. Right. But I try to relate, you know, I try to relate everything. We try to take sciencey shit and turn it into an analogy or turn it into a metaphor story or something like that. And I like looking at things like, even like a high performance car, if I'm going to take a car and make it faster, it's it's not as simple as just putting fast stuff on it because it has to take that speed it has to take that horsepower and put it to the ground so you got to think about the tires you got to think about the drive shack you have to think about the transmission you have to talk about air coming in fuel coming in there's a lot of engine management all that stuff has to be thought about before you start building a really fast car so it's the same thing when you look at physique there's things that need to be taken care of first to get you ready to go on the journey. And then you have to figure out where do we put the, when do we put the parts on and when do we need to upgrade parts or remove parts? And that's kind of how I build stuff over time, but it takes a lot of long-term foresight and planning. I think it's a good sidetrack because at towards the end of we'll call it prep towards the end of the prep for this shoot. I talked about how I think the only cardio you had me doing was really steps and it wasn't even like a step goal. It was just maintaining some steps. And I would try to continually explain how you front loaded a lot of my aerobic work before. So I think it's a good time still to just keep repeating this because no matter how many times you talk about it, people still, they're like, oh my God, that's the first time they've heard that because they're still used to people. I'm four weeks out. I have three hours of cardio a day type of mentality. So if you can kind of go into that explanation, why do you do the aerobic long stuff first and then taper it towards the end? Yeah. So you have to look at it. First and foremost, all the activity you're doing, you're doing to, to elicit some type of adaptation. So if you want a specific adaptation, you have to give it a specific stimulus. so we shouldn't people people you'll see this a lot online people will never use your activity to burn calories why not that's not the only reason you should use it but so it's kind of a half truth right there's nothing inherently wrong with using exercise to create a calorie deficit it's not as efficient as pulling calories but at some point if you want to get to an unhealthy level of leanness and that's what it is right if you just want to lose fat they're right but if you want to get to an unhealthy level of leanness, which is most photo shoot and onstage stuff, you're going to have to do use tools in an unhealthy manner. So what we use the tools for initially is to get in shape, better work capacity, get your blood pressure regulated, get your heart rate regulated, make your sleep better. All of that type of thing.