How to plan for getting the most out of both and the best ways to integrate them together.
A while back we had a look into cardio or weights first, let take a look at mixing the two together.
Stating the obvious first, we could put them on different days to mix them overall throughout the week, meaning each session has a distinct aim.
When we start looking at actually mixing the two within a single session things can seem like they start to get more complicated, clearly everything can be made as complicated as we like – the key is trying to keep it as simple as possible!
As always let get some stock examples on the go and see how these would play out:
Balanced – we have half the session cardio and half weights, very straight forward, easy to remember and it will work. The downsides are that scaling one of the sides becomes hard, or if we are having a not so good day we may want to do one or the other…
Prioritise one – so this could be where we want to increase our performance in one but maintain a level in the other, it’s doable to a point, in that when we start to build on the priority, the other naturally gets harder, for example if you start at 5k with cardio and extend to 10k we can’t expect our resistance work to maintain with the extra prior workload.
Prioritise each in different sessions – we could do the above but balance this over the week, cardio focus Monday, weights focus on Wednesday and so on, this would give good balance, however is going to make building up performance for both more difficult with greater time between each workout.
As always there will be variants of the above, this just gives us a flavour of how we could break down the sessions to incorporate both.
The main take away is that with 2 separate goals it becomes more difficult to juggle them, that doesn’t mean its not possible, just takes a bit more planning.
I like to think of it as having and A and B goal or a build and maintain goal:
A goal (e.g. 6 months) – increase cardio undertaking
B goal (e.g. 12 months) – Progress strength over the next x months
Build goal – increase compound lifts by 10%
Maintain goal – keep cardio at current baseline
Again, many flavours of this and as always it depends on what our overall goals are.
Need a hand with goal setting and balancing? Give a member of Team SF a message to help you out info@spikefitness.co.uk or 07597215652.