The weeks since the Lift Weights Faster launch have been a blast with all the tweets, Facebooks, and emails about people doing the workouts. Twitter especially is full of the #liftweightsfaster hashtag.
Ever since the book launched I have had an idea in the back of my mind, and I started working on it soon after all of the hard work of the launch died down. Today I sent this out as a gift to anyone who already bought Lift Weights Faster through me and I want to offer it to you today as well.
See, I have a bit of a dark secret when it comes to conditioning work. And it’s not just that I hate doing it.
My problem with it stems from how it’s applied. In short it’s prescriptive – not adaptive. In teaching strength training I always teach people to move towards making things easy and doing just the right amount to be a stimulus for change. But in conditioning work the rigid formats and the intention to do it in the least amount of time possible often conflicts with the minimal effective amount ideal.
With strength training the application of this seems to more intuitive. We choose our movements, and make modifications to them, by testing them with biofeedback. We stop sets before it gets hard and use biofeedback to determine when we reach the minimal effective amount. It’s all very simple, intuitive, and straightforward.
But for whatever reason, it all goes off the rails when it comes to conditioning. There is a better way.
So I sat down to create a structure that reconciled these ideas and allowed you to customize your conditioning work just as much as you do your strength training. This became Lift Weights Faster and Smarter.
The protocol allows you to tweak and personalize your conditioning work just as much as you would your strength work. What’s more, it provides a model for taking into account many of the other stressors in your life that will affect your capacity to recover from difficult conditioning workouts and making adjuments accordingly.
Of course, you wouldn’t need to do this if you don’t have outside life stressors, never feel tired or get poor sleep, and are always fully recovered for every training session. In that case, you’re probably just fine to hammer away with conditioning workouts as prescribed.
But if not, my experience tells me that this will get you better results, faster.
I created Lift Weights Faster and Smarter as a guide that accompanies Lift Weights Faster itself. It builds upon several of the Lift Weights Faster workouts to create an additional 48 distinct workouts. You could certainly use it alone, but combining the Smarter protocol with Lift Weights Faster would give you 1040 discrete workouts. No, I’m not kidding. One thousand and forty workouts, all across the spectrum of stress.
Let me say that again so I’m clear. Combining this protocol with Lift Weights Faster gives you 1,040 conditioning workouts.
Pretty sweet.
Even without the Lift Weights Faster package, you’ve got 48 workouts and a protocol that allows you to instantly customize any workout you might find online, in a magazine, or from a peer. It’s kind of like having a trainer on call to ask how to maximize the benefit you get from a workout that wasn’t designed specifically with you in mind from the ground up.
