Conditioning

Conditioning here is not a metabolic circuit and there is no music turned up to cover a lack of coaching. It is machines, sleds and carries, structured as intervals, and the point of it is that you can do a bit more of it each month.

What is on the board

Most sessions are one of four shapes:

Intervals on a machine. Rower, bike or ski, on a work-to-rest ratio that tells you honestly how hard the work is meant to be. If the rest is short, the work is not meant to be a sprint.

A long single effort. Fifteen to twenty minutes at a pace you could hold for thirty. Almost everyone goes too hard for the first month and the coach spends that month telling them to slow down.

Carries and sleds. Eighteen metres of turf, farmer’s handles, sandbags. This is the most useful conditioning in the building for anybody over forty and the least popular.

Partner pieces. You work while somebody else rests. Nobody gets paired by ability, because the pieces are written so that it does not matter.

The bit worth saying plainly

You will not be shouted at, and nobody will tell you to leave anything on the floor. If a piece is written as twenty minutes, it is twenty minutes, and being capable of finishing it is the standard rather than being wrecked by it.