Chapter 7 · Alphagenix Podcast
Balancing Strength Training and Cardio
May 22, 2024
so where do you stand on the you know how much emphasis do you put on strength training and how much on cardio depends it depends on the situation right so kind of like that uh what we just talked about like you may have somebody that just needs to do rehabby exercise maybe they just need to work the scapula maybe they just need to do internal external rotation, whatever. Maybe someone actually needs someone to physically put their hands on and mobilize that first and teach their brain that these are okay positions and show them where the problem is and how they get out of pain, right? So when we go to things like strength training and we go to things like conditioning, it's the same deal. You do a needs analysis. Where's the client? What is the tool that's going to make the most sense? Whether that's cardio, whether that's strength training, whether that's stretching, whether that's dedicated mobility work, whatever that may be. So it's always a flow chart, right, for me. So it's like, okay, I have to look at my client and go, can I have four or five different directions? I have 100% resources. Where do I put each of those percentages? So if I have, for example, somebody comes in and they're massively morbidly obese, get guy and he's 400 kilos, 300 kilos. That's big. Okay. And a lot of, a lot of personal trainers that go, well, they just need to lift weights and diet. Okay. That dude doesn't fit on most of the equipment and he's never trained before. And he's so massively inflamed that his perception of, uh, of pain is going to be very, very high. So he's going to get doms. He's not going to enjoy working out, you have to give him the low hanging fruit stuff. That's not going to make him feel bad. First, let's get some weight off of them and then slowly integrate in other things. It's like everybody can walk or at least almost. And if they're so big, they can't walk. Great. We can sit in a chair and we can squeeze the muscles for time. We can sit in the chair and we can get a little, one of those little bikes that sits on the ground. He can just pedal stuff that's going to be low impact. The dude just needs to get moving. If we can get him moving and get some momentum, we can start lifting weights later, right? But now let's look at the complete opposite. Maybe we have somebody comes in and they're skinny fat. They just don't have any muscle. Cardio is probably not going to be the answer for them. The answer is going to be probably learning how to apply tension to the muscles with some external load and starting to build some muscle to then reappropriate their muscle to fat ratio. Somebody comes with a high blood pressure. Take somebody with high blood pressure, stage 2 hypertension. They walk in, they've got 150 over 95 or 150 over 100. Best thing to do, let's go put them on the leg press and really jack that blood pressure up. Or how about 5x5 back squats? These are the things you've got to think about before you put somebody under some type of task. What are the consequences, both positive and negative? You can meet people where they're at, don't you?