Conditioning for Strength Athletes and Powerlifters

well anytime look is whenever you're at the highest level of sport it's not going to be healthy but like back then I mean that was back when powerlifters did no conditioning there there was no such thing as a sled and a prowler we thought that conditioning was for marathon runners and you didn't you know we didn't do barbell curls because that was for girls and it was all that type of mentality right yeah um and i think yeah if i could if i could buy a delorean and find a flux capacitor and go back in time and have a talking to jesus talking myself i probably i probably would have been an even better power lifter and i probably could have been you know world class power lifter but you know i got to the point where it just wasn't worth having you know being in pain and getting winded walking up a flight of stairs it just became to me like I didn't I got to a point where I'm squatting like 318 and I'm dead lifting like you know 333 or so and that that I was the strongest person that almost every gym I went to but I was also not sleeping well I had sleep apnea you know I couldn't walk across the room without being out of breath I'd be out of breath just sitting there doing nothing And I think if I could go back in time and reteach myself there you can definitely be incredibly strong even elite level strength and still have adequate conditioning for life. And, you know, when we first started muscle nerds, no one was really talking about this, but after teaching foundations around the world a few times, we know lots of power lifters right now who are like some of the top power lifters in Australia that are now saying, hey, you need to do your aerobic work. You need to keep in an adequate level of conditioning to keep these metrics in check so that you don't die. Because if there's one thing that's really horrible for performance, it's dying. That's definitely going to kill performance, which is a concept. That's a concept I got from Broderick Chavez, who's well known for training palifters. and he's also a paddle lifter and a biologist. And I think, yeah, you just have to look at how do I balance this stuff out? You know, if I can get it, you know, the hard part is getting where you need to be. The easy part is the maintenance. So I think if a lot of people will start, like, really reassessing where they are and saying, okay, yeah, sure, I can squat 300 kilos, but my blood pressure is 180 over 100 i can probably afford to spend eight weeks getting my blood pressure down without my without my total going down too much my total will actually probably go up even higher if i'm more conditioned because if i'm more conditioned i recover better and i can train harder and i can train with a lot more volume and i can eat a lot more food yeah so so i got like a list of questions but we'll get straight into this one which i was going to do a little bit later but you know I saw or I listened to or watched the the round table that you did uh recently with Dr. Mike T. Nelson and uh Alex Vader is it um yeah and it was interesting you you guys were talking about cardio for lifters or aerobic work for power lifters weight lifters things like this and it's often a hard sell when you're working with someone who's just trying to build max strength as to taking a bit of time off of that pursuit and building that aerobic base. So that's something that you would look to do is, is kind of pull someone back from their strength training, if you like, and spend some time just focusing on some of that low and slow building, building that aerobic capacity.