Cardio For Powerlifters
In powerlifting circles, cardio is often viewed as a dirty word. How many times have we heard “cardio is hardio” or “more than six reps is cardio bro”.
We love shifting heavy tin and enjoy the process of it. But improving your cardiovascular fitness be of huge benefit not only to your health, but also to your powerlifting training. Excess specificity or specialising for powerlifting too much can come at a cost for your health and overtime, ironically for your performance too.
Making gains is largely indicated by getting in adequate training volume. If your fitness is too low to get through an adequate training dose, your fitness can impair your gains.
Long term success in powerlifting is largely indicated by longevity in the sport. With better health, we’re better positioned for longevity.
You see where I’m going here.
To facilitate positive health and performance outcomes, we want to keep lifters lifting for as long as it brings them joy and fulfilment. Being cardiovascularly fit is a major key in that.
Before I dive in, some quick definitions:
Cardiovascular health: the health of your heart and blood vessels
Cardiovascular exercise: physical training that exercises the heart and blood vessels, which typically looks like exercise that gets your heart rate up and keeps it up for a prolonged period of time.
So how exactly does cardiovascular exercise benefit powerlifters?
Cardio will help powerlifters recover quicker between sets, between exercises and between sessions.
In powerlifting training our heart and lungs play a significant role in recovering us from our high intensity effort sets.
Within the one session, a more efficient aerobic system allows for enhanced recovery between sets so that fatigue is minimised. With recovery up and fatigue down, we are able to produce more force in successive efforts, which can mean a greater load is able to be lifted, and may be the difference between a successful and failed rep/set.
Between sessions/from session to session, improvements in aerobic fitness can allow for a quicker return to a rested state. Being able to recover quicker between sessions can permit the lifter to tolerate more training volume over time as they are ready for more hard training sooner. More volume can equal more gains, which we love.
Poor fitness can limit how much training we can do in a session before quality drops.
When we want to progress our training by increasing the volume (how much training we do) or intensity (how hard it is) with poor fitness, we may find that we are impaired from doing so. We can’t make our training more or harder because we are unable to complete it, complete it to a high standard, or recover from it.
As we become more advanced in our lifting, we will require harder and more training to continue to make progress. With poor fitness, we may find that we are unable to add any more volume or intensity to our sessions or to our week because we are unable to get through it or recover from it. Or, if we are able to get through it, we notice that the quality of the sets falls away, we execute sets badly, can’t complete the sets, feel a little nauseos, and it’s questionable whether or not completing the remainder of the session will actually yield any benefit.
In this way, it’s not our strength or muscle size holding us back, it’s actually our fitness. Improve your fitness, and you’ll be able to complete more high quality training.
Strength isn’t the only thing we care about; we want to be healthy too.
We’re not just lifters. We are first and foremost, humans. Health matters. And it doesn’t take much to improve our fitness. A little dedicated effort can yield some pretty substantial results for your health and quality of life.
Cardiovascular training can:
Improve your mood and overall emotional wellbeing
Help with stress management
Reduce the risk of most chronic health conditions
Support your immune system
Help maintain your independence as you age
Among so many other benefits.
Cardio training is just good for you. You don’t have to choose one or the other of strength or fitness — you can (and should) do a bit of both.
Considerations for introducing cardio training.
Before you go adding high intensity cardio in to your training week, first assess your daily activity. If you’re currently pretty sedentary/ don’t move around a lot, you don’t have to go straight into running or cycling or anything like that. Just moving around more and increasing your step count can be a great first step towards improving your fitness without worrying about interference with your strength training.
If powerlifting and your strength is important to you (which I’ll assume it is since you’re here), you’ll want to be mindful of the interference effect when incorporating cardio in to your training routine. That is, how your cardio training interferes with/affects your strength training. And this will be different at different times of the year and in different training phases.
Do you have any competitions coming up?
If you do — are they big comps or smaller ones for you?
Or are you in an off season and far from your next competition?
It sounds ironic but there’s a trade off in here — if we never do cardio, our recovery ability can be low which will affect our lifting. But if we do cardio, we’ll also need to recover from that, which will affect our lifting. So as best as possible, we want to introduce our cardio in a way that acutely, it will tax us minimally.
Across the year — further away from competition when your powerlifting training is less specific is the best time to initially introduce cardio to your routine, and also the best time to crank up your cardio training. (Though note: introducing some cardio at all near to a competition day is likely much better for you than doing no cardio at all, ever). In your off season, you’re better able to dig in to harder cardio training. Closer to competition, you may opt to dial your cardio back to permit yourself to get through more and harder strength training.
Across the week — you’ll want to position your cardio sessions so that they have the smallest impact on your strength sessions. A long run the day before a heavy squat session will probably have some negative impacts on said squat session. Conversely, running after your squat session or before your bench day will have fewer adverse affects on your lifting. For interest, for someone who’s main sport is running they may structure their week the other way around. Run is the priority, and squat the day after a run. They want to give their running their best efforts, and would be less concerned if their resistance training suffered.
It takes much less training to maintain fitness than to build it. So once you’ve achieved a level of fitness that you are happy with you can cut reduce the amount of cardio you do per week. 1-2 sessions of low intensity aerobic training per week can be perfectly adequate for maintaining your fitness and the associated benefits.
So, what type of cardio?
There are many ways by which you could introduce cardio training in to your schedule.
Add some low intensity cardio to the end of your strength sessions. This can be completed on machines like the air bike or the rower, or even via a short walk/jog. Start with short stints and you can build this up over time. I like this option because it doesn’t demand that you carve out another time slot in your week for training. You’re already dressed, warm and at the gym. You’ve just got to start. While your fitness is lower, you may want to talk to your coach about reducing your strength work for a time to leave you with more in the tank for your cardio at the end of your session. You can increase this back over time once your fitness improves.
Or perhaps you want to introduce some cardio-specific training sessions in to your week. If this is the case, I would encourage you to choose a cardio option that you enjoy, and also to consider the interference that modality may have on your lifting. EG, cycling and swimming are less demanding on your joints than running; rowing is fun but does tax your quads and back, which we rely on a lot in the power lifts.
Circuits can be a great option here as they include multiple movements (rather than repetitive motions), minimal eccentric loading (less fatigue on the working muscles) and we can emphasise movement variability (variety of movement). Circuits should be kept at a moderate intensity (RPE 5-7), so as not to be too taxing, and should last around 30-60 minutes. When first introducing cardio, start on the lower end of these recommendations.
Start small by introducing a small amount of cardio work. Then assess and make changes as required.
Cardio training can work hand in hand with powerlifting so that lifters can improve both their health and their performance. Six reps isn’t cardio bro. Improve your fitness.
