Workout of The Week 31 (Conjugate Run Program)
Meat Leopard Part 7: Conjugate Running Program Week 2
“You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.” - Somebody who didn’t want it all, and they sure as heck didn’t read the meat leopard training articles.
A common theme of this program is the balance between lifting & running. If you’ve tried a similar training style you will notice the leg days interfere with the running days. Today’s article will explain how to mitigate these issues. Before we get into load management and performance optimization, here’s week 2 of training.
Check out the notes on Substack to find all parts of the meat leopard program.
Notice, the primary lifts progress heavier by dropping weights and the secondary movements are at a greater RPE. Ideally, you add some weight each week to the primary movements and add reps (or weight if you max out the rep range) for any rep range based movements. The progressions for this program are brutally simple. Simple progressions executed with intention can produce powerful results, trust the process.
How To Survive Concurrent Training
You will likely feel weaker and sore while training multiple qualities. This is why the meat leopard program uses RPE instead of prescribed percentages. Max Aita has a famous story about training weightlifting in Bulgaria. At that time, the Bulgarians were still following the infamous “max out everyday” style of training. They would max out on the snatch, clean & jerk, squats, and pulls every day, multiple times per day. Before he came to Bulgaria he could squat north of 250 kg but after several days he could barley squat 70 kg. The training beat his body into submission.
This led Max to ask the Bulgarians how they managed to max out this often. They responded by telling him they were essentially sandbagging the training just to get by. You shouldn’t necessarily sand bag the training, but you do need to start conservatively in the first week of the block to give yourself wiggle room to build from.
There is also another important lesson in this story. You cannot reasonably exert maximal intensity all the time. The meat leopard program uses high, medium, and low intensities to avoid pounding the body into submission day after day. You don’t want to max out everyday!
Greater training demands also mean greater recovery demands. Eat more protein, get more sleep, stay well hydrated, and keep up with your supplement regimen. It’s going to be especially important to do the basics and even more so to cut out things that will make it harder to recover: staying up late, binge drinking, eating junk food, and introducing unnecessary psychological stressors.
Main Lessons:
1.) Start at a point you can build up from each 3 week block.
2.) Some days should be light, don’t max out.
3.) Recover better, remove the unnecessary stressors slowing you down.