TACTICAL BARBELL II: CONDITIONING by K. Black

• It’s great having a 600lb squat and 400lb bench press. But, as an operational athlete, if you can’t run, work, or thrive for long periods of time in a multitude of energy demanding environments, you are ineffective. Your big bench press is useless, your big squat is useless.
• General Endurance will primarily consist of aerobic development.
• The truth is you will develop things like resiliency and everything else you need through all facets of your training, by simply showing up and doing the work.
• Actively progress the systems you need to excel at, maintain the systems you don’t.
• Maintain, rather than attempt to actively progress your lower priority fitness domains.
• “Working out” can be generic, “training” cannot.
• Conditioning is your ability to produce energy to meet the task at hand.
• Conditioning is not just ‘cardio’. There’s interplay with strength, strength-endurance, power and other systems. The body is interconnected and complex, so there is a lot of overlap and debate as to what the boundaries actually are between things like ‘strength’ and ‘conditioning’.
• The body’s general ‘fuel’ consists of Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP). The engines that put that fuel to use are the aerobic and anaerobic systems.
• A well-developed aerobic system can provide energy for hours. It utilizes both sugar and fat in the process.
• the aerobic system will provide most of the energy for almost any work or exercise you do.
• The anaerobic system (which includes the lactic and alactic system) is capable of generating energy extremely fast, but can only sustain that energy for about 10 seconds (alactic system) or 60-90 seconds (lactic).
• Don’t get wrapped up in what’s better or worse. Everything depends on your end goal.
• Two very important skills; learn how to PRIORITIZE, and learn how to be EFFICIENT.
• First, you have to know how to train each system in the most efficient manner possible. Efficiency becomes important, because as a multi-tasking athlete you can’t afford to lose training time or energy doing things in a less than ideal manner.
• Choose fewer, but more effective tools.
• The deeper and bigger you dig your well, the more raw material you have available to grow your other abilities.
• Another rarely mentioned, but valuable side effect of endurance training is hardening the mind and increasing your threshold for tolerating pain. It helps develop will power and teaches you to keep going.
• General strength and aerobic capacity are foundational fitness domains.
• To state the obvious, endurance-type sessions improve the aerobic system.
• A well-developed aerobic system can produce energy for hours.
• Ultimately, to successfully work hard for a long period of time – you have to work hard for a long period of time.
• Both grip and midsection are extremely important.
• Constant, frequent, high intensity training will without a doubt eventually burn you out and sideline you if not approached intelligently.
• One of the quickest routes to failure is over-eagerness, resulting in trying to go too hard or do too much at the start – which then results in injury or burn-out.
• Many overestimate how consistent they are, and tend to miss more sessions then they think. Commit to less, but with ironclad consistency.
• Every third week, (3, 6, 9) make your conditioning sessions easy.
• Make no mistake, with regular training you will develop work capacity levels that make you appear superhuman, but you won’t get there without a steady, intelligent, consistent approach.
• Don’t try and train everything at the same time.
• Some tools are better for the job than others. Choose those that are most effective for the attribute you are training.
• Advance yourself in fewer activities that do the same job. Make sure your desire for variety/novelty doesn’t get in the way of actual improvement.
• Consistency is king. Progress takes time. Stay consistent, and keep plodding.
• You will have bad days. Some sessions will be better than others.
• You will not always enjoy training. You will hurt. Many of your training sessions will be less than perfect. This happens to all of us. Suck it up. You are slowly turning into a machine. This doesn’t happen overnight.
• Focus on what’s important, not on products, gear, and marketing.
• Focus on what’s important – doing the work.
• Amateurs are all about tech, gear, ‘hacks’, and shortcuts.
• Focus on continuously hammering away at the basics.
• The important thing for you as a rank beginner is consistency and volume over time.
• Your mantra should be ‘consistency first’.  This will ultimately lead you to high conditioning levels, guaranteed.
• But, there are two things I can’t recommend highly enough. Number one, find a hill. Number two, get a kettlebell or two.
• Your first priority is to complete your session. That’s it. You don’t have to set records or look pretty doing it. You can take as long as you need to.
• Prioritize consistency over volume and variation. Do a few things consistently, instead of trying to do more and constantly falling short.
• Commit to less, and stick to it.
• Tailor your exercise selection to your needs.
• Slow yourself down if you have to. Work for time, not distance.
• Trying to run after kettlebell swings is a real treat.
• The more you can handle + recover from = the more you can do over time.
• Nothing builds your legs, heart, lungs and willpower like hill sprints. Hills are to conditioning what barbells are to strength. Hills are a cyborg-factory.
• I highly recommend you make hill sprints a staple in your continuation protocol.
• A note on hill ‘distances’. Since hills vary in length and incline, and you’re limited by geography, it’s pointless assigning specific distances/sizes.
• The Plank & Shank is a quick all-in-one core training session, and makes a good finisher. The ‘plank’ is self-explanatory, the ‘shank’ refers to a static back extension/hyperextension.
• An important quality is how a candidate performs when he’s brought to his personal breaking point, or past it.
• One tried, true, and very effective stressor, is sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is the great equalizer.
• Running is easy to control, guaranteed effective, and requires no special equipment or circumstances.
• The thing that separates successful trainees from the rest is easy - it’s not special gear, supplements, or the latest workout techniques or routines. It’s consistency.
• Consistency, consistency, consistency. Physically put yourself at your training session.
• Just show up and do it – and you will get results guaranteed.
• Running is one of the most effective and quickest ways to force the physiological adaptations necessary for improved cardiovascular performance and conditioning.
• If something’s working for you – don’t change it regardless of what I or anyone else tells you.
• If you overdo the long steady state running, other attributes (strength, hormonal balance, muscle tissue) will suffer.