Strength And Conditioning

When you are designing your fitness program, either alone or with a personal trainer, what are your goals? Are you aiming for strength or conditioning – and what’s the difference? Can you mix the two together?

Let’s look at the differences between strength training and conditioning before deciding how you can incorporate both, or even if you want to incorporate both.

The goal of strength training is to increase your physical strength in one given area or muscle group. When you are building muscle you are increasing muscle mass, decreasing fat, strengthening bones and joints and improving your overall confidence. Another difference is that with strength training you are probably doing one exercise for 3-8 repetitions until the muscle is fatigued.

Let’s contrast that with conditioning, in which the athlete is exercising to improve cardiovascular fitness and doing the same thing repetitively. With cardiovascular conditioning you are doing the same exercise over and over again with a much lighter load to allow you to continue the program. Although the weights or resistance may still feel heavy, they are light enough to do 12-15 reps for 3-4 sets, moving quickly between exercises without rest to keep your heart rate up.

In other instances conditioning programs include more cardiovascular work, like rowing, running or elliptical trainers, for 15 minutes or more.

Think about the tennis player that must have the muscle development in the chest and arms to hit the ball powerfully across the net but with the conditioning to run through the court for 2 or more hours in the sun. This is the athlete who has done both strength training and conditioning to improve his sport.

However, it is also important to incorporate rest and recovery days for both strength training and conditioning, as well as concentrate on strength and power training in different blocks of time as your aerobic endurance. When athletes try to include both in the same weeks or months they will decrease their strength gains and their power output.

In a study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, researchers found that athletes who did high resistance circuit training had a similar gain in strength and mass as those who did more traditional training but also experienced a shorter training duration. These are athletes who incorporated circuit training with their strength training. (1)

References:

(1) Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research: Similarity in adaptations to high-resistance circuit vs traditional strength training in resistance-trained men

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21659889

RESOURCES

Stae of Fitness: Strength Training vs Conditioning

http://stateoffitnessblog.com/2012/08/29/strength-training-vs-conditioning/

CrossFit One World: Strength Vs Conditioning

http://crossfitoneworld.typepad.com/crossfit_one_world/2013/02/strength-vs-conditioning.html

Athlete Strength and Performance: Cardio VS Conditioning

http://www.athletestrengthandperformance.com/cardio-vs-conditioning/

Fullerton University: The Effect of Heavy-vs Light-load jump squats on the development of strength, power and speed

http://faculty.fullerton.edu/leebrown/PDF%20Files/Academic/McBride-heavy%20vs%20light%20load%20training.pdf

NSCAs Performance Training Journal: Strength, Size or power

http://myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/chalmers/PDFs/Strength%20size%20or%20power.pdf