Strength and Metcons: The Right (and Wrong) Way to Combine Them

Let’s talk about how to combine strength work (and muscle building) with metcons (crossfit and other conditioning)

There are right (and wrong) ways to do this.

First let’s talk about two walls that people run into when doing this (aka the wrong ways)

Combining strength training with conditioning will make you better in more ways than one.

Whether your goal is general health, muscle building (without being out of shape), or being in great shape (without losing all your muscle)…combining these things the right way is key.

Because most people combining strength with conditioning see some great results at first…
Until they don’t.

Usually this is in the 6-12 month range where you start to notice problems creeping in:

• Poor performance
• Low recovery or overall energy
• Brain fog
• Difficulty building muscle

To avoid this, beware of running into one of these two walls:

Wall #1: pickles and ice cream

Pickles are pretty good.
Ice cream is really good.

You might be able to argue one way or another (probably not against ice cream), but here’s what this means for strength and conditioning.

Context is king.

Adding pickles to your burger is a great idea.
Some ice cream later that night…also not a bad idea.
Combining pickles and ice cream together?

Not the same.
But this is exactly how most people set up their workouts.

You find a really good strength program (ex: 5/3/1, 5x5, conjugate, etc)
You find a solid conditioning plan (or a bunch of solid but random metcons)
You slap the two together, and expect great results (good + good = best..right?)

Fall into this trap, and you will certainly run into a wall.

Maybe a few weeks from now.
Almost certainly a few months from now.

Because these approaches aren’t siloed or independent from one another.
You have to adjust your lifting to your conditioning, and your conditioning to your lifting.

Wall #2: ruin the appetite

Have you ever had the perfect dinner, only to be so full by the time dessert comes?

You have two choices here:

1. Say no to some really good dessert, and miss out on it
2. Say yes to dessert, not actually enjoy it as much, and suffer the consequences that can come hours later

This is what happens when people put some more intelligent thought into either their strength or conditioning plan.

You might actually follow advice we’ve given around good strength programming and customize it to your needs: use progressive overload, prilepin’s chart, EMOMs, etc

Or follow a really well designed conditioning plan.

But by the time you finish the main course of your programming, you’ve got nothing left for the other.
Or you face the consequences of trying to stack too much on top of the perfect amount. Which is toeing the line of overtraining.

If you’ve prioritized your strength, but haven’t given any thought to your conditioning..results will suffer.

Enter the Gordon Ramsay Solution (not the actual name of our methodology, but you get where I’m going)

You might be annoyed by Ramsay..but he’s still world class.
And this type of detail is what’s needed to avoid hitting the above walls and to make progress year after year.

Here’s where the 80/20 volume method comes in:

20% of your total session volume should come through your strength movements.
80% of your total session volume comes through your metcon, mixed modal work, etc

Super simple in theory..but it requires some high level programming, a little math, and actually using of your brain.

Total session volume is calculated through sets x reps x weight

So for simple math, if an average session is 10,000 lbs of total volume, get your sets x reps x weight of your strength work to add up to around 2,000 lbs (20%)

Then get your main volume (and conditioning) through a metcon or circuit that hits the other 8,000 lbs of volume (80%)

​Take a look at how this actually looks broken down on paper, with a real example, right here.​

If you want to get great results on your own, this is the kind of effort and intentionality you need.
If you have a busy life and other things you’d rather spend your time on, let us do it for you.

This is the kind of effort and design we put into all of our programs to make sure people are seeing results right now and 10 years from now.

​Try any one of our programs, for free, for 7 days to see how we program things.​
...or get your calculator out and try it for yourself