Metabolic Conditioning

Transform Your Fitness with Metabolic Conditioning

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Metabolic conditioning is often shortened to “metcon.” It is a type of fitness training designed to supercharge your metabolism. This acts as the engine that burns calories in your body.

Think of your metabolism like a car engine. Like how some engines burn fuel more efficiently, metabolic conditioning helps your body become better at using energy. This means you can get stronger, faster, and leaner, all while improving how your heart and lungs work.

Let’s dive into what metabolic conditioning is. We will explore why it’s important. You’ll learn how you can do it and when it’s best to include it in your fitness routine.

What is Metabolic Conditioning?

Metabolic conditioning is a mix of high-intensity exercises. These workouts raise your heart rate using primarily resistance-based moves with little rest between exercises.

Why Do Metabolic Conditioning?

1. Burns more calories. Even after you stop, your body keeps burning calories at a higher rate. This is great for losing weight or staying lean.

2. Improves endurance. Regular metcon training makes your heart and lungs work better together. So, you can do activities like running, swimming, or biking longer without getting as tired.

3. Builds strength and muscle. Lifting weights or doing bodyweight exercises makes you stronger. It also builds muscle. This helps your body burn more calories even when you’re not working out.

4. Time-efficient. This is because they’re so intense. This means you can get a great workout in a shorter amount of time.

How to Do Metabolic Conditioning

Metabolic conditioning workouts usually combine strength training exercises with cardio exercises. For example, a circuit. It includes push-ups, squats, jumping jacks, and mountain climbers. You move from one exercise to the next with little rest. The key is to pick exercises that target different parts of your body. You should do them at a high intensity.

Here are some tips:

  • Start Slow. If you’re new to metcon, start with simpler exercises and shorter workouts. You can add more challenging exercises and longer circuits as you get stronger.
  • Keep it varied. Mix up your exercises to stay interested and to work different muscles.
  • Listen to Your Body. Metcon is intense, so it’s important to rest when necessary and not push yourself too fast.

When to Do Metabolic Conditioning

How often you include metcon workouts in your week depends on your goals and fitness level, but 2-3 times a week is a good starting point for most people. Make sure to have rest days between to let your body recover.

A sample training week could look like this:

  • Monday: MetCon
  • Tuesday: Mobility + Zone 2 Cardio
  • Wednesday: MetCon
  • Thursday: Rest Day
  • Friday: MetCon
  • Saturday: Mobility + Zone 2 Cardio
  • Sunday: Rest Day

Metabolic conditioning workouts are great for people with busy schedules. They can be performed in 20-30 minutes from start to finish. The higher intensity part of the workout lasts 10-15 minutes.

Final Thoughts

Metabolic conditioning is a powerful way to boost your fitness by improving how your body uses energy. It helps you burn more calories, build muscle, and increase your endurance, all in a time-efficient way.

Adding metcon workouts to your routine can help you achieve many fitness goals. They also keep your workouts fun and hard. Remember to start slow, keep it varied, and listen to your body to get the most out of your metabolic conditioning sessions.

The Perfect Combination: Kettlebell Training and Rowing Machines for a Total-Body Workout

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Are you looking for a powerful full-body workout?

Combining kettlebell training and rowing offer incredible benefits, including increased cardiovascular fitness, improved muscular endurance, and enhanced core strength.

Kettlebells are the ideal fitness equipment for a home gym because they have a small footprint (space efficient) and offer hundreds of different exercises ranging from squats, pressing, pulling, carrying and ballistic movements. Rowing machines are a incredible tool for building cardio conditioning while sparing the joints from impact.

Kettlebell exercises like snatches, swings, and cleans can help you build explosive power and functional strength, while rowing machines provide low-impact, high-intensity cardio that targets your entire body.

MetCon Kettlebell & Rowing Workout

Kettlebell Snatches Combined with the Rowing Machine
  • Perform 8 kettlebell snatches on each side.
  • Row 250-300 meters.
  • Rest for 45-60 seconds.
  • Complete 8-10 rounds.

Whether you’re a fitness enthusiast looking to take your training to the next level or a beginner looking for an effective and efficient workout, kettlebell training and rowing machines can help you achieve your goals.

Keep your metabolic conditioning workouts simple and effective. There is ZERO need for the intense exercise portion of a high-intensity metabolic conditoning portion to be longer than 20 mintes.

In less than 40 minutes you should be able to warm up, train mobility, strength and cardio, cool-down.

Workout Finisher: Kettlebell Swings and Burpees

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Workout finishers (also known as metabolic finishers or conditioning finishers) are a short burst series of exercises at the end of a workout designed to complement strength based training.  

A workout finisher can be a single exercise, like a burpee, or a series of exercises strung together (squat, push up, pull up, etc).  Finishers typically take 1-10 minutes to complete, and can be organized into intervals or metabolic resistance training (think thrusters).  

A tough finisher will burn extra calories, boost cardio and work capacity while increasing the fat burning potential of the days workout.  

These days, I mainly string together several different exercises, using a variety of movement patterns and equipment.  From time to time, I’ll schedule a single exercise finisher, but it’s rare.  Burpees are a great exercise to use if you’re only going to do choose one.

Mixing Kettlebell Swings and Burpees

This post is all about one of the toughest workout finishers…

The word “burpee” makes me cringe. Burpees are a brutally effective exercise and I rarely program burpees into my own training simply because they are hard.

I shouldn’t admit that.

Burpees jack up your heart rate fast.  Few other bodyweight exercises compare to burpees for total body conditioning.  Burpees, though simplistic, are extremely functional.  Transitioning up from a low ground position to a standing position happens in sports all of time.  Maybe not for high reps like we program in a workout, but it happens.  

How do you make the burpee experience harder? Add in some kettlebell swings. 

This kettlebell swing and burpee workout finisher is brutal.  Back when my equipment arsenal consisted of 3 kettlebells, I gave the kettlebell swing/burpee finisher a go.

The combination fit the equipment and space I had available perfectly.   

I stopped twice on my first attempt. Not for extended periods, but long enough to consider throwing in the towel.  It’s hard to remember my finishing time, but I think it was less than 8 minutes.

I do remember the fatigue however, it was hard to gather myself.  I ate a pile of food that night and the following morning and the afterburn effect was potent.  

So I share this workout finisher with you. Keep it in your back pocket on the days where you’ve completed your skill work and strength training and still high on motivation.

Equipment needed… 

You’ll need one kettlebell and some space to for burpees. Ideally the burpees will include a squat jump each time (aka: full burpees), so take into account overhead clearance. Choose a kettlebell you can swing for 15-20 repetitions comfortably. It will be sub-maximal weight for the swings.

I recommend most males to swing a 24kg or a 28kg kettlebell and females to swing a 20kg or a 24 kg kettlebell.

Of course, you can swing whatever size kettlebell you want, the recommendations are just generalized suggestions.  A heavier or lighter kettlebell may be chosen based on your fitness level and experience with swings under extreme fatigue.

By design, this workout finisher has 100 kettlebell swings and 55 burpees.

Structure:

10 KB Swings + 1 Burpee
10 KB Swings + 2 Burpees
10 KB Swings + 3 Burpees
10 KB Swings + 4 Burpees
10 KB Swings + 5 Burpees
10 KB Swings + 6 Burpees
10 KB Swings + 7 Burpees
10 KB Swings + 8 Burpees
10 KB Swings + 9 Burpees
10 KB Swings + 10 Burpees

The kettlebell swing reps remain fixed at 10, while the burpees increase by 1 rep each round. When you finish the 10th burpee on the last round, you’re done.

When you’re doing this workout finisher, it’s easy to lose track of what round you’re on.  I’ve performed several rounds twice by mistake.

Modification and Variations

Decrease Difficulty

There are a ton of options to reduce the stress of this workout finisher, here some examples:

• Decrease kettlebell swings to 5 reps each round
• Swing lighter kettlebell (keep reps at 10)
• Burpee with no jump (removing the jump makes burpees easier)
• Burpee with no push up and no jump (again, much easier)

Don’t forget… take rest if you need it.  Resting is a simple way to decrease the difficulty of this workout finisher.  The goal should be to push through each round without rest, but if you need it and technique depends on it, take it.

Increase Difficulty

Careful here.  Having completed this workout finisher periodically over the years, I know how brutal it can be.

Before trying to make this harder, set a target finish time finish of 6 minutes or less. Anything over 6 minutes and there is no reason to make it harder.  You’ve got progress to make before increasing the difficulty.

If you finish in less than 6 minutes, consider sizing up the weight of the kettlebell or adding an extra round where you’ll complete 11 burpees in the final effort.

I don’t foresee a lot of people needing more intensity, but there are always options to do so.

Variations to the original…

Smaller Cycles w/ rest periods

Keep kettlebell swings at 10 reps but stop at 5 reps of burpees.

Round 1:  10 Kettlebell Swings + 1 Burpee

Round 2:  10 Kettlebell Swings + 2 Burpees

Round 3:  10 Kettlebell Swings + 3 Burpees

Round 4:  10 Kettlebell Swings + 4 Burpees

Round 5:  10 Kettlebell Swings + 5 Burpees

Above is an example of one round.  

Rest for 90sec-120sec after this round before starting the next round.  Complete anywhere from 2-5 rounds total.  This decrease the working time in half and give you a chance to rest before going again.  

Break up the Burpees into separate movements

Instead of performing a full burpee with a push up and squat jump, break it up.  Now you’ll be performing like so:

Round 1:  10 Kettlebell Swings + 1 Push Ups + 1 Squats
Round 2:  10 Kettlebell Swings + 2 Push Ups + 2 Squats
Round 3:  10 Kettlebell Swings + 3 Push Ups + 3 Squats

And so on…

Flip-Flop Swing and Burpee Reps

Switch around the kettlebell swing and burpee reps.  

Round 1:  1 Kettlebell Swing + 10 Burpees
Round 2:  2 Kettlebell Swings + 10 Burpees
Round 3:  3 Kettlebell Swings + 10 Burpees

And so on…

 

The afterburn effect of this workout finisher is HUGE.  If you’re pushing your boundaries, you’ll feel it for hours post-workout.  Personally, I like to position something like this after a strength training session where I know the next day is a rest day.  

Workout finishers are great for adding in a little work capacity and increasing the fat loss potential of a workout.  

Give this a try and let me know how you did. 

 

Cheers, 

Kyle