Cardio…. WHAT ?? But I thought this was Crossfit? It’s a sneaky trick that we play to get your cardiovascular system working hard without it being boring. Ask yourself how you felt last time you did a met con workout that involved exercises done quickly under moderate load for reps? I bet you had a hard time breathing and it was a tough workout. The word:metabolic conditioning, or “met-con”, has been thrown around a lot in the fitness industry especially in CrossFit. It can be confusing to understand what it exactly means and WHY it’s programmed in your training. You must have a structured amount of sets, reps, and rest periods in order for a proper “met-con” workout to slash body fat and improve performance. Metabolic conditioning is the act of literally conditioning the MUSCLES to better use the fuel delivered to them by improving the efficiency for the different metabolic pathways.
Why should we do met-cons? They improve your cardiovascular health and increase your ability to burn fat POST workout. This is known as the “after burn”, better know as EPOC (excessive post-exercise oxygen consumption. This can leave your metabolism raised above your resting metabolism hours after your workout according to the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. You can create this effect in many ways by utilizing a variety of tools. You can do a tabata workout with 20 seconds of work and 10 seconds of rest for 8 rounds. You can also create a circuit of exercises that you follow one after the other without much rest and work through a specific rep range.
Choosing exercises for Met-cons can become a little tricky if you don’t know what you want to accomplish from the workout. Think of exercises like multi-joint movements that work multiple muscle groups are your best options when constructing a metabolic condition circuit. Remember the triple wod we did ? The big three bench mark WODs of Fran, Grace and Randy? They are all multi joint movements that taxes your body on all levels to perform the movements.
But, there is a downside to this HIGH volume of training. Your body can only withstand so much. You need to be careful how much volume your doing and at what intensity level. In the beginning you will feel like you can just go on for days, then it all catches up to you in an instant and you feel like you got bulldozed by a truck. In doing met-cons you also need to be prepared for taking a little bit more time for recovery and rest to repair your muscles from the workout and stress you just created on your body. If you over train past that limit that you can handle you will quickly see insufficient recovery. Do this for long enough and your performance will slowly start to decline and you are more pron to sickness and injury. Training volume is something you need to conserve. You need to make sure that when you spend it, you’re getting something back in proportion to what you paid. Too little isn’t good and neither is too much.But it must also be said that having too little is far preferable to having too much. If you’re patient, adding volume in small doses is easy. Fixing an overtraining issue that has built up over a few months isn’t. Recovering from an injury can be even worse.
Start off slow. Add volume to your high-intensity metcon when your progress stagnates. I would still say that you’d get a better workout doing a 3 minute metcon 3 times with rest intervals than doing the same thing for 9 minutes straight, but when you’ve arrived at that level you’ll know what works best for you.
Have fun and TRAIN HARD 🙂