Naga Conditioning Week 2: Forcing The Desired Adaptation

This is for all the NAGA guys coming to the conditioning class, for those that missed this week, and anyone else interested in great training.

Real quick, here’s what we’re doing and why it works.

There are three main energy systems and each one has two components; power and capacity. Depending on what energy system that’s being trained and if you want complete or incomplete recovery, would dictate how long to rest between sets.

Since we want to force an adaptation to remove the accumulation of fatigue substrates, we want incomplete recovery.

Normally you want about 8 to 12 weeks to train this. But we don’t have that luxury. We started the first week with a 3:30 rest (I normally start with 4 minutes) because you guys have better conditioning than Joe Average. This was still to long, so I lowered it to 3 minutes.

This week, we lowered it to 2:45 rest between sprints. This will work REALLY WELL if you can do the workout one more time during the week. I like Wednesday because of where it falls in the week in relation to the saturday session. Just make sure you do the workout several hours before or several hours after any other training session that you do on that day. So if you do a jui-jitsu class, kickboxing class, or anything else, make sure you don’t do them to close together. 

Remember, you have to be able to recover from your workouts and they shouldn’t last any longer than an hour because of stress hormones. Training them to close together would be like one big loooong workout from the lack of rest time and recovery between sessions.

If you’re pulling hamstrings, this often because of a magnesium deficiency. If you’re taking a multi vitamin with magnesium in it, it’s still not enough magnesium. It doesn’t matter how good the multi is (centrum sucks and just gives you expensive urine). You need to take around 1 gram. I like my athletes to take 500 mg at dinner and another 500 mg just before bed. This will also improve your sleep quality (I've found that magnesium glycinate works the best for this).

Other reasons for pulling muscles while sprinting is muscular imbalances. Unilateral exercises along with proper stretching and soft tissue work can help tremendously but would take to long to explain in the scope of this post (let me know if you want help with training and I can write you workouts that will help you).

Here’s a quick video of the training session performed this past Saturday.