1. Your body does not have to adapt to jog for forty five minutes. About everyone can walk for forty five minutes, no problem. To step the speed up by one notch your body says "okay this is ne... nope I'm used to it." And it doesn't have to make any physiological changes in order to perform the work you are asking of it. Now if you sprint, let's say 5 times with equal rest in between each effort, your body says "what the fuck! If this guy wants to sprint there is no way I am going to carry this extra chub around!" And it loses it. Clearly that is a simplified version of what actually happens, there's a lot more to it (nutrition, frequency, etc) but the point stands- intensity is king.
2. When encouraging someone to do intense exercise instead of long exercise, I ask them to think back to the Olympics this summer. The men and women running the distance events (5k+ let's say) look like cigarettes being forced to move by years of regret. And the sprinters, they're all SILFs. The men have six to twelve packs, the women have asses to die for. Train to be a great sprinter and you will eventually look like a great sprinter. Train by running only long distances and you will eventually burn out and I will laugh at you.
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One difference you will notice in this programming is the length of the metabolic conditioning (aka met-cons or WODs.) Why are they shorter? Shorter conditioning workouts (as you will most often here me refer to them) allow the athlete (you) to seriously up the intensity. High intensity is exponentially more productive and will improve your fitness more than high volume (aka longer duration.) I know this is a hard pill for some to swallow, but it is the truth, if you believe in all that science bull crap :)
In order for high intensity to have the greatest possible effect, two transitions must occur:
1. Gotta go heavy- Today's workout began with a strength focus: Hang Snatch 3x2. Followed by a conditioning portion: perform 2 hang snatches every minute on the minute (EMOM) for 7 minutes (with single unders used as active rest.) Let's say you made it to 95 pounds for the first three sets of hang snatches. If you did 45 pounds for the EMOM, 47% of 95 pounds, you probably found the conditioning to be less than satisfactory. In order for this sort of short conditioning to have the desired effect, you must work at percentages much closer to your one repetition maximum- you gotta go heavy! The hardest change to make here is overcoming the mental barricade. To that I say, in the words of Nike, JUST DO IT. Also, it becomes more important than ever to keep track of your weights, times and scores. Without some sort of context, many workouts will become a crap shoot and you will miss out on the benefits of proper planning.
2. Gotta work hard- Anybody can feel like they did hard work by working for 25 minutes. But a 25 minute jog (or workout performed at a jog pace) is not going to make the physiological changes you're all here for (looking better naked.) To make those changes, we must sprint. No longer will performing workouts at a comfortable pace do the trick, it's time to work really fucking hard. To help this process, let's all vow to encourage each other more and more during workouts. Yell, taunt, bullshit, encourage- help your fellow athletes put the work in so that we can all be better versions of ourselves.
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