Structuring Cardio and Conditioning for Adaptation

jeez that's impressive that's fucking impressive so what do you do with i guess cardio so would you generally have that relatively high going up into the into the show and do you back it off slowly or is it more of a call we're taking you from an hour a day to 30 minutes a day or something well so first we have to like what are we talking about cardio? Are we talking about aerobics? Are we talking about high-level cardiovascular respiratory training? You've got a way of thinking about, are we talking about sub-VO2 max, which is sub-70%, or are we talking about over that? Everything's a tool. What we prefer to do is we front-load the program with aerobics. Whereas most people will put the aerobics at the end because they're chasing calories. We'll put it at the front because I'm chasing adaptation. I want you building more mitochondria. I want the mitochondria to be working more effectively. I want you to have a massive amount of oxidation going on, which takes oxygen, which means we need aerobic work. So we might do two big blocks of aerobic training, get all that taken care of, and that might be the first, say, six to eight weeks of their training. Then we're going to drop that off, right? And we're not going to really use it. We might use a little bit like maybe some Tabata as a reverse by something that's kind of on that aerobic anaerobic threshold. We might leave that in there a couple of days a week because you don't need a lot of it to maintain your aerobic state. Then we move in more into just weightlifting, right? Because without the muscle, you know, you can be as lean as you want, but if you don't have the muscle, you're not going to be able to show it on stage. You're not going to look good. So kind of like the middle of that building season will be almost all weightlifting. and then as we get close to beginning contest prep we might start

slowly adding a little bit more conditioning at that point so that we can keep the food high. But we're mainly using the aerobic work initially to create adaptations to get someone oxidizing better so they can eat more food and they perform better, they're training harder, they're recovering harder.