Best time for conditioning

[Danielcccook]

Hello everyone, my name is Dan, and I am a newb and this is my first post. I do apologize if this has been answered already, but I searched for this on the forum and came up with a bazillion results of peoples training logs, and couldn't find my answer.

First- a little background. I am following Starting Strength as written (shocking- I know). No mucking around and changing things I don't like. I am very pleased with the progression, and am feeling much stronger and noticing a large amount of muscle mass already gained.

My athletic goals are to eventually one day compete in power lifting, a I have found a good amount of love for the sport over my time with barbell training, and feel it is a good goal to aspire too.

I am also training for indoor rowing competition as well. The rowing plan I use has 6 days of rowing, 1 speed work (short, hard max effort intervals), 1x Tempo session (500m-1500m distances @ or slightly above 2k time), and 1x hard distance session (ie 5k max effort), +3 easy row sessions (8-12k).

Alright- now- Before the way I had set up my rows was I would do my intervals the SAME day as when I was doing SS. This worked quite well for a time, but as the squat numbers have climbed (and the workout times have increased with adding chins and back extensions), I am very physically tired and I am worried that the already taxed muscles will be more prone to injury if I do my interval rows afterwards.

So- the obvious answer would be- switch the intervals to the off days of SS and do your easy row sessions the same day as SS- but my fear of this is that the rowing intervals will impair my recovery from SS.

So- from you guys- the coaches- what have you seen working the best for your athletes- recommending the heavy conditioning to be done immediately afterwards, or on the days in between weight training?

Thanks a ton.

Dan

[Tom Campitelli]

So- from you guys- the coaches- what have you seen working the best for your athletes- recommending the heavy conditioning to be done immediately afterwards, or on the days in between weight training?

You know how much conditioning I have most of my novice trainees do? None.

For people beyond the novice phase, conditioning should generally be done after your lifting, but you are trying to do too many things at once. Six days of rowing plus three days of Starting Strength is too much to recover from when the weights get heavy. You are probably going to have prioritize one of these things over the other. Either you are going to see the Starting Strength progression out to its end, or you are going to do your full rowing program. The demands from both of these programs when run at the same time will guarantee substandard results from both. So, what do you want to do?

[scwot]

I am following Starting Strength as written (shocking- I know). No mucking around and changing things I don't like.

except

I am also training for indoor rowing competition as well.

brilliant!