I've finished the 6-week conditioning block from
Paul Carter's Ultimate Beastdom - How to get What Constitutes Strong (WCS).
This program calls for 3-4 days of hard conditioning a week, 1-2 sessions of steady-state, and only two sessions of weight lifting with the goal being to stimulate strength maintenance.
Here were my results for the 3 types of hard conditioning:
Timed Mile - 7:58; previous best was 9:12.
Hammer&Tire - 15 minutes Tabata-style (30 seconds/10seconds); previous best was 5 rounds of 40 swings with 45 second rests for 10 minutes.
30 yd. Incline Sprints - 20 sprints in 18:30; previous best was 8 sprints in 10:00.
In the gym, I didn't miss a single lift, although my last round of singles on OHP were very slow. Additionally, I actually set a 1 Rep PR in the Squat, but that's due to having missed my one previous attempt with that weight due to form issues. Still, it was nice to get the lift on the books.
Additionally, I actually set a Chin-Up PR with 12 reps at a gym BW of 205.
It took me a while to get in the correct mind-set for this cycle as I kept looking forward to my gym sessions, and leaving the conditioning as an afterthought. Once I flipped that, I started having a lot more fun with the program. Also, the 45 minute walks I did for steady-state were very nice. I wake up much earlier on the weekends than my wife, and it was nice to just go for a walk in the morning once or twice a week in that time.
The Mile was something that had been in my programming for a few weeks when I was doing Defranco stuff, but since then had only been used for an occasional steady-state finisher after a lifting session. It was really cool to come back to it for 6-weeks to try and bring it up. I was able to plot a simple mile around my neighborhood with easy 1/4 mile markers, and it was great to be able to walk out the front door, and be back home with my conditioning workout done all in less than 15 minutes. This will definitely be another tool that I try to incorporate several times a year going forward.
Sledge hammer swings have been a mainstay of my programming for awhile, as they always made sense as a way to get some good conditioning in while giving the legs a break, they fit in well after a Bench or Press sessions, and they make me feel like a badass afterwards. However Paul's use of Tabata timing in this was very different from what I had been doing, and very kick-my-ass as well. Prior to this block, I'd treated them more like core work. By that I mean I would do sets of moderately high "reps," and then rest for 30-60 seconds before doing another "set." The 30 seconds of swinging, 10 seconds of resting protocol on this cycle was
much harder conditioning wise. I do want to say, that it didn't seem to be as much of a grip workout as the longer rounds of swings however, and that is also good to know.
The sprints are something I'd been working to try and incorporate for awhile. I hadn't really gotten serious about them because what I
wanted to do were the holy hill-sprints advocated so heavily by Carter, Wendler, and others. However being car-less, and living in the flat city of Chicago had made this un-feasible for realistically incorporating them into my life. Both my gym and my home have stretches of street/side-walk nearby that are at a steady incline, so I finally opted to just do 30 yard sprints there. They seemed hard enough to start out, and hard enough to progress on (I failed to make my goal on one week of this program), that I've decided they're acceptable. They will continue to be a mainstay for me.
I had a lot of fun on this program, and I learned a lot about myself. The only bummer is that I now have 3 different conditioning drills I really like, plus there's a Prowler at the gym now, and I'm going to have a hard time deciding which drills I want to include in non-conditioning cycles going forward. Probably I will go with the Prowler next time since I haven't done any programming with it yet, and want to get a baseline set. After that, it's going to be really difficult to choose!
One other thought: I still look back fondly on 531, and plan to go back to that after I finish out the final block of this programming. However, I don't see any reason that the template Paul uses here can't be used as another template for 531. Top end strength, conditioning, rep strength, right? I'm thinking it would be set up as such:
Top Strength - 4 days/week, Press, Dead, Bench, Squat. 531 sets/reps for those movements for 6 weeks with no deload, so a week of 5's, a week of 3's, 531 week, 5's, 3's, 531. Only going for rep maxes the last weeks. Assistance work would be as prescribed in the Ultimate Beastdom program.
Conditioning - 2 days of lifting a week. You would set up like Paul does, but using 531 sets/reps. So Week 1 would be 531 sets for Bench and Squats, and Week 2 would be Press and Deads with the only difference being that you would also do some light sets of Squats on Deadlift day, and no assistance on any lower body day. Or, there are a variety of 531 2-day templates out there, so you would pick one of those, and just make sure you pick one with minimal assistance, and only get the prescribed reps. Then you do the conditioning as Carter lays out in his program.
Rep Strength - This would be very similar to Boring But Big 531, 3 times per week. The difference is you only get the prescribed reps on the 531 sets, and then you do as many sets as necessary to get 30+ reps with 63% of a
reasonable target 1RM for the cycle. Paul recommends your current max +5%. Also, you would have to think about what you want to do with the Press and the Deadlift. Paul only uses the Press as Bench assistance here. Also, he has changed his mind about high-rep Deadlifting since he wrote the program. I will talk more about this when I start the Rep strength phase next week, but basically you can do Deadlift just for the 531 reps, and then work on your rowing strength for high reps afterward . For the Press, a good compromise might be to switch to incline for this cycle instead of doing separate days for Bench and OHP. Of the 3 blocks, this one is that one that takes the most tweaking to use 531.
UPDATE: I forgot to include one other aspect of the program that I added. Paul once wrote a post wherein he discussed that you can bring up one, smaller muscle group on a conditioing/diet/cutting phase. I decided to do biceps for balance and fun. I did a 4 sets of high-reps on a curl variation at the end of every lifting session. I alternated between BB Curls, Reverse BB Curls, DB Hammer Curls, and Rope Curls. I don't take body measurements, but I would say my biceps definitely look larger after this program.
