Something’s not working. You’ve been training hard; you’ve been training consistently, but you’ve plateaued. Or worse, you haven’t made any progress. You feel like you’ve got the elements of your training in line. You’re strength training. You’re conditioning. You’ve even added mobility training to your regiment. But something isn’t right. You should be a better place for all the effort you’ve put in.

 

So, you’ve launched into an internet search for what you might be messing up. And you realize that it’s your training split. Your training lacks solid, scientific organization. The problem is you’re still not sure which training split is right for you. Most of what you read just talks about meathead stuff like body part splits. But you want to improve your strength and your endurance so you can do more cool shit outside while also improving your longevity. 

 

 

Well, homie, you’ve finally come to the right place. We’re about to walk right through how to create a weekly training schedule for improving strength and endurance at the same time.

 

 

The Science of Planning Strength and Endurance Training

You’ve come looking for answers, so I’m sure you’re interested in at least a little nerd talk. Well, I’m gonna give it to ya.

 

Let’s start with allostasis. It’s how your body adapts to stressors. More specifically, it’s how it deals with stressors so your body returns close to homeostasis. Now, this is all about survival. Every kind of stressor contributes to your allostatic load or the amount of stress imposed on your body. That deadline at work counts. So does that unresolved fight you had with your friend. And so does your strength and conditioning program.

 

The key with allostatic load is to hit the sweet spot. We want to give our body enough stress to create a response without overwhelming it. To do that, we must understand that the body uses resources to respond to and recover from stressors. That means we must wave how much training stress, and what kind of training stress, we impose on the body during the training week.

 

Let’s expand on the point of offering enough stress without overwhelming your body. Different people with different fitness levels need different amounts of training stress. The type also matters. Some well-trained lifters can handle loads of weightlifting stress, but they can’t handle very much conditioning stress. Vice versa, some very aerobically fit folks are crushed by a low-volume, low-intensity strength workout. The key is to follow a training plan that scales each type of training to meet you where you’re at. (That’s what we do at Beyond Strength.)

 

Here’s a recap: To help our body reach allostasis during training, we have to give ourselves the right amount of training stress while also waving that training stress throughout the week, so our body has enough resources to recover from training. 

 

There’s one more bit of science to cover before we get to the schedule.

 

 

Science of Planning Part 2: Neural – Metabolic Continuum

This concept is much simpler than it sounds. 

 

We do the most neurologically demanding training early in the training week and place the most metabolically demanding training later in the training week. 

 

See, metabolic stress from hard conditioning sessions inhibits your ability to access and display your strength because you can’t create as much juice with your nervous system while you’re metabolically recovering. Your muscles just won’t contract as hard as they would if they were fresh. That means you can gain as much strength as you otherwise would have.

 

Since our goal is strength and endurance, we organize the week to optimize for both. Heavier strength training efforts from early- to mid-week. Intense conditioning after we’ve done our most intense strength training.

 

This also plays well with allostatic load. It creates the conditions for efficiently waving training stress throughout the training week.

 

Alright, let’s lay out that strength and endurance training split.

 

 

The Weekly Training Split for Gaining Strength and Endurance

After years of training, experimentation, research, and learning, the following is the training split we’ve developed and now use every week at Beyond Strength. And we use it for the best possible reason; it works. Here goes:

 

The Split

Monday: Intense Strength and Power Training

Tuesday: Aerobic Capacity Training

Wednesday: Slightly Less Intense Strength and Power Training

Thursday: Intense Conditioning or Aerobic Capacity Training

Friday: Easy Strength Training or Metabolically Demanding Strength Training

 

A Little More Explanation

Doing intense strength and power training on Monday ensures that we follow the neural-metabolic continuum and put ourselves in the best position to get the most out of our strength training. It also creates a hormonal elevation that helps us adapt to training throughout the week.

 

Aerobic capacity training on Tuesday creates a dip in training stress while also introducing a type of training that helps us recover between strength sessions.

 

Strength training on Wednesdays is typically a little more metabolically demanding and less intense. (In strength coach speak, intense means using more weight or trying to go faster or harder during a conditioning session.) That’s not always the case. It sometimes changes, depending on the training block. 

 

Our intense conditioning, when we do it, comes on Thursday so there’s no interference with our strength training. There are, however, training blocks with no intense conditioning. We only do aerobic capacity training during the first block of the year to help build and improve our aerobic base.

 

Friday is a flex day, meaning sometimes we be flexin’. It also means that it’s an easy strength training day during some training blocks, and it’s a high-rep, metabolically demanding strength day during others. If we’re on a program with a particularly spicy Thursday conditioning session, we do an easy strength day on Friday to help drive recovery while maintaining our strength training volume. But if we’re doing a program that’s based on building strength endurance and muscular endurance, Friday has its own brand of picante sauce.

 

 

Build Strength and Endurance at the Same Time

This simple training split builds strength and endurance at the same time. You could follow it year-round for years to come and continue to make strength and endurance gains. That’s what our Beyond Strength members do.

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