Weightlifting as Cardio

What’d we say? | Podcast Transcript

(00:00):

What’s good. Thank you for joining me. I’m Johann Francis CSCS, and welcome to my show. Ego Killer! In this show, we cover everything that goes down inside the gym so that you could move better outside in life.

(00:19):

Yes, my friends, that was what you call a little juxtaposition inside the gym outside in life. Right? My attempt at wordplay is really to inspire you guys to ironclad your body and your mind inside the gym. Okay. That’s why we do what we do. We work hard inside the gym, so that out there in life, things are a little bit easier. Working out, improves our mood. Working out, makes our bodies more up to task. When it comes to dealing with stressors. Even if those stressors are really acute and they happen all of a sudden, but especially if they’re long term and they come outta nowhere being inside the gym, ironclads our body. And so on the show, sometimes I’ll talk about incidents that happen outside in the world. After all this is ego killer, right? The act, the process of killing the ego begins in the gym, but it carries on outside.

(01:17):

But today I’m gonna stick with something that’s very much gym related, weightlifting, CrossFit. How about you guys? You do the CrossFit thing. Still. We notice that it’s dying down a little bit. We notice that a lot of the big gyms that started the, the, I think calling it a trend is a little bit disrespectful. You know, it’s a lifestyle. It’s definitely a paradigm at this point. Maybe it’s a little bit in its teenage years, which if it were a trend, being a teenage, being a 15 year old trend is pretty archaic as far as trends go, but let’s call it what it is. It is a paradigm shift inside of fitness, right? I was there for the beginning of it. A lot of the people that I trained with when we trained in commercial gyms, we saw it happening. We, you guys, you guys down with that, I’ve seen a lot of very high level athlete looking folks that are CrossFiters, but what’s the rub on that?

(02:13):

It’s that you get injured. So you’re out here doing your CrossFit thing. You get injured, you go to the CrossFit gym, you throw around the weights, right? All of a sudden you’re doing snatches. You’re doing the thing that you see in the big Kazakh, sunny women overhead pressing 300 pounds. All of a sudden it’s like, wait a minute. How am I getting fast, tracked to compete with the lay ocean power lifters. I’m just trying to lose a little body fat before my wedding. You know what I mean? You guys down with, with CrossFit? Well, whether or not okay, whether or not this paradigm is still shifting, or if it’s circling the drain, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the impetus and why that came about.

(03:03):

Okay. So if we go back about 17 years the weight rooms across our country, across the state look pretty similar, pretty qu Tian. You got, you didn’t have a lot of weight racks. You got a lot of power racks. You had a lot of machines, treadmills, ellipticals, stationary bikes arm. Ergometers not really kettlebells. Txs all the things. What happened was this thing called functional training. And without boring you with the definition, the didactic and the denotation of functional training, let’s just say open space was at a premium. Whereas before having that open space covered by selector size machines, like it was a high school strength and conditioning room. And Jim Plunkett used to frequent it. You know what I mean? And there’s Nautilus everywhere. Those two things shifted with the idea of strength. Training now became the idea of hit interval training, cardio.

(04:05):

It became dope to lift weights and do cardio at the same time, bodybuilders scoffed, their butt cheeks tightened up their arms. Well, it was already tough for us to reach our back, but look, the idea of lifting weights because of cardio and hit interval became popular then. And right around that time, you saw people starting to lift weights really, really fast, do really, really heavy stuff for a short amount of time as if it were a strength and conditioning program designed for everyday people. When you do that, you start to foster create competition. Rather competition starts to turn into speed speed with that time under tension, with that load, with that level of technique and attention involved might lead to injuries might lead to that decline in popularity years later, okay? That is a set. Obstensibly the life cycle of what we call modern day.

(05:01):

Crossfit. You guys down with CrossFit, you guys still doing a thing, cuz like I said, many years back, you could find a lot of really ripped shreded men and women doing this CrossFit thing or a very least weight lifting for cardio. It’s a move. It’s a whole move. All right. I want you guys to get into it. Not CrossFit. I want you guys to get into the idea that lifting weights can actually be great for your heart. And I feel as though I’m appealing to those of you who are lifting a lot of weight and you love lifting weight, you love doing squats. You love doing hip hinges. You love doing hip thrust. That’s cool, but you hate the treadmill. You hate even fricking picking that treadmill up past four. You know what I mean? But here you go. Your doctor had already told you, yo you’re on the borderline for high blood pressure or diabetes.

(05:52):

You gotta probably up that cardio. You feel like yo I’m 35 old. I’m not really about to be out here walking. Like I’m an octogenarian on her Tuesday morning, right after she did her gardening at 9:30 AM my day’s half over. Like that’s not us. <Laugh> that was a long winded kind of. And I guess I’d be a metaphor. Sorry. <laugh> look, you don’t have to worry about walking or doing cardio or any of that. What you can do is start lifting weights as cardio. And then I did a talk on this pre pandemic. All right. There’s a whole methodology to it. Okay. And there’s a whole methodology to doing your weight lifting is cardio. Okay. And it’s because I see a lot of you wanting to lift really heavy weight, but then I also see a lot of you doing things like ketlebell swings and you’re not doing it long enough because you feel like you gotta do a really hard and really short.

(06:54):

And so I’m feeling like I need to Elize the advantages of doing traditional compound moves like your bench, press your push, press, et cetera, your back squat, front squat, deadlift, and measuring out your heart rate and your rep counts. Look, if you’re gonna do heavy, you can do heavy, but then you’re gonna actively recover for 3, 4, 5 minutes afterward. All right. And don’t worry, this isn’t CrossFit. It looks like it, but it’s not one thing noticeably missing from CrossFit at least traditionally. Back when I read rich Frings book and rich Fring was actually like the CrossFit, you know Titan, he was the man over there. He was doing the thing he was doing it repeatedly, you know, multiple time champ walk off retirees champ.

(07:44):

The thing with doing your CrossFit moves is one thing was noticeably missing from old school CrossFit or teenage CrossFit was the lack of an endurance or stamina based Ste. There was no stamina based or long distance. So you were hitting all your energy systems, your power, your strength, and an anaerobic. Totally. And getting a little bit of the intermediate, but you weren’t getting the distance stuff. Well, they started to add that back later. Well, the way that we lift weights, all right, the way that weight lifting for cardio goes is you could lift really heavy to begin your set. But then by the end of your set, you’re doing light stuff. You’re even doing body weight. Okay? Now you’re doing this for two, three weeks. Then after week three or four, you’re not doing heavy, heavy 90% intensities, you’re doing like 75% intensities.

(08:38):

Only the back end of that set that I just described where you do a compound lift the bench press. It’s 70%. You’re doing like 15 reps. You take a little breather. Now you’re still in the same superset. Now you’re doing kind of intermediate lifting, followed lastly by a very intense body weight. Okay? So that was week one, really heavy ending with light body weight tapering down to light body weight wakes cycle number two, which is like three, four weeks later, everything’s intermediate and light towards the end of your set. You’re doing really intense body weight work, clapping, pushups, plyo pullups.

(09:23):

And then what I’d have you do? We were working together for weight lifting for cardio, because look, this is cardio because by the end of the set, your heart rate is jacked up no matter what. And we’re doing things that allow your body to continue to move. We’re doing things that allow your body to continue to sustain the blood’s flowing. The heart rate is driving up. Okay. Traditionally, when we were doing our 10 reps of this and, and five sets of that, your heart rate doesn’t go up at all. Did you know that if you’re doing straight up weight, lifting your heart rate, doesn’t go up as much as you think it does totally in totality, not at all. In fact, it’s one of the lower end ways to burn calories, but it feels great. And on top of that, besides the anodyne feeling you get, you get stronger.

(10:17):

So your metabolism starts to shoot up. Now, if you start super setting and doing other things in between more specifically smart moves in between you keep the heart rate up. So the last cycle out of the, the the first two that I mentioned, the last one would be very lightweight, 20 reps probably medium to lighter weight intensity in between. And you’d end up doing about five exercises, four or five exercises for your superset. And you would end with body weight also at low intensity, but very high reps. So by staggering that you guys can avoid CrossFit. If this is like anathema to you in your life, right? And you could still do your weightlifting for cardio. We could rock this thing. Like it’s 2007, man. Let’s do that. But in all, you know, all jokes aside, this is a great way to kind of get strength gains, but have them be applicable.

(11:22):

Cuz I see a lot of us out here trying to avoid what the doctor has us doing, but still lift weights. And I’m saying, we gotta do both. We have to take care of ourselves, our bodies, but our heart too. So it’s great that we can lift the weights, but also are you doing all that cardio on the back end to get the health gains going the long play. This is what we’re in, in, we’re in this for the long play, the long distance life stuff, right? Not the one and dunes are you in it for the long haul? So that’s why you need to be out here doing your cardio because that’s, what’s gonna actually sustain you for the long haul. That’s gonna keep your, your strength gains really, really high. So by and large, do the thing to get you a pump, right?

(12:09):

It’s important that you get your pump. It is, it really is. But making sure that you’re also getting in your cardio too cycle on and off, if you want to. All right, you ever see the I won’t name specifics cuz I’m not trying to hate, but there is a couple of guys out there doing the YouTube thing and you got these huge guys, right? They’re big, big, big, big, big men. I’ve heard big dudes inside the gym, treat cardio as if it was the Triam cough medicine that your parents try to shove down your throat when you were eight and you had fricking sniffles just treat it like it’s all the worst.

(13:00):

I constantly, there’s a couple of guys that we keep up with on my circle and they were, you know, old gym guys and <affirmative> they would laugh on like Facebook and be like, oh you skinny guys in you’re cardio. And you’re talking about the biggest dudes in the gym, you know what I mean? And it’s kind of hilarious because it can’t, there’s nothing more anathema to like a big bodybuilder or a media than like cardio. It’s funny. You know, I was watching my guy also on the, the gram I was watching the guy and he was making one of these funny memes where, or one of these reels or whatever. And in the reels is the, the man’s himself. He’s working out. He’s real ripped. He’s you know, he’s a trainer man he’s ripped. And it was like, he was playing with one of those interactive personal trainers that they got going on now on the mirror.

(13:55):

Right? So you’re on the mirror. You’re looking at yourself, got dialed in with the program, the digital program, access it anywhere about to work out. I click I and man on the Instagram, he hits his yoga, does his yoga and he scrolls after he is done with his yoga, he scrolls to weightlift. So he pulls out his weight’s gonna do the weight lifting active stretching. Does his active stretching does his boxing right scrolls up the next day does his boxing. Right? And he’s Leany shredding he’s buff guy. Right? And then he goes, he scrolls up interval training thinks about it. Let me try it. First thing the instructor over the mirror says is, all right, you guys get ready. We’re gonna pump it out, lift weights and get those intervals as high as possible. And for some intense cardio, you guys ready?

(14:48):

My man ran out the room. It’s kind of like that. It’s kind of like that. I know you guys hate it, but you know what? You can still have your traditional compound lifts and also have your cardio gains too. Oh yeah. And it’s not CrossFit in any event. I hope you guys give that a shot. Need more details. Heads to the website. I want you guys to go ahead and rate me on apple podcast. Can you do that? I’ll give you a free gift for five stars. I promise. Give this program in a try. Let me know how it works out and until the next one you guys stay up.