Alactic + Aerobic training
Between March 2019 and June 2020, my training followed pretty much the same format: A+A, or alactic + aerobic training.
I was coming off of almost two years without training—mental health pretty much killed my desire to do anything but the most sporadic and low energy of workouts. A+A gave me the perfect format to follow: simple, focused, progressing by feel, giving me the chance to relearn the rhythms of my training.
The concept of A+A training is pretty simple: train your alactic system, your speed and power system, in short spurts resting long enough to keep the next set relatively high quality, but not so long that your heart rate drops out of the aerobic zone. Rest periods might last anywhere from just under a minute, to maybe a minute and a half and the entire session is done with an elevated HR at least in the low working aerobic range, with spurts where you do your actual working sets.
These work sets are max power, max effort—but very short. You aren’t burning yourself out in the glycolytic red zone, the efforts should last 10 to maybe 12 seconds, tops. And the movement should be something powerful, something you can do pretty much continuously. A ‘grind’ sort of lift like a squat or a bench press wherein you reset at the top of each rep wouldn’t really work; this is more for ballistic movements.
Kettlebell ballistics (swings, snatches, cleans, push presses and jerks) are ideal for A+A, but you can also do jump squats (not going down into a full squat each rep), powerful pushups (if you can do lots of pushups easily), or even variants of the olympic lifts like snatch or clean pulls from the hang (if you have excellent technique with the classical lifts).
The training effect from this will cover a lot of your bases. It’s good strength and power work, of course, and you’ll get a lot of practice doing whatever movements you choose since the idea is to go for quite a few sets. You’re also getting your aerobic cardio in, and training your body to use your aerobic system to recover so that you can hammer short bursts of really hard effort, which is applicable to a lot of different tasks.
If you’re easily bored or crave massive amounts of variety, this probably isn’t the system for you but you could do a circuit of different movements if you really wanted to. That is, with a kettlebell you could do a set of snatches each arm, a set of viking push press each arm, and a set of two arm swings and repeat those 5 sets, with roughly equal rest periods, for several rounds.
The total number of sets you should do is up to you but keep in mind that the overall aerobic effect is a goal here. 3 sets isn’t going to accomplish much… 15-30 is a decent range to get started with. The more explosive and… let’s say ‘low endurance’ you naturally are, the more you’re going to want to stay on the lower end of that. I personally rarely went over 25 sets, and tended to stick around 15-20.
What movements did I use? Pretty much kettlebell one and two arm swings, and kettlebell snatches. That’s it. Yes, I rotated those three movements as my primary training for over a year. Other stuff tended to follow, generally some pushups and either pistols or goblet squats. There were short stints where I worked on turkish getups and bent presses as well but these were more maintenance work than anything else.
Here’s what a session would look like (after warming up):
Set of 5 snatches left arm
Rest about a minute or a minute and a half
Set of 5 snatches right arm
Rest and… repeat for 20 total sets (10 each arm)
2-3 sets of pushups alternated with some sort of squat or maybe hanging leg raises
All of this would take around 45 minutes or so.
Progression? This happens organically. If you’re doing A+A 3 times a week or so, that is an awful lot of heavy, productive practice on whatever movements you choose. With a kettlebell, simply start working in some heavy sets every now and again. Every third set you do, use the next bell size up, for example. You could play with the rest periods to some degree, not enough to change the overall system, but keeping the reps to ‘no more than 5’ and going on the top of each minute with a bell size down could help build some volume on some days. You could use a heavy-light-medium rotation… this system is extremely flexible.
My results? Well, I went from struggling to single arm swing the 36kg for a set of 10 each arm (detrained here, remember) to being able to do over 30 consecutive reps with a 40kg and a set of 10 with my right arm with a 56kg kettlebell. Heavy snatches took some work, I started off with a 28—everything over a 24 felt heavy and unnatural—and I ended up being able to do multiple sets of 5 reps with a 40kg.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B_XbSeLhOAr/
My bodyweight remained about the same. I think it probably would have dropped except for various medications that I was taking. Two in particular resulted in my gaining quite a bit of weight, and none of it came off during this time. I did noticeably thicken through my legs, back and glutes, though. I also maintained the ability to do at least 15 strict pullups and a near-2.5x bodyweight deadlift without training either of those—just a result of all the heavy kettlebell work.
My general health and cardio base improved as well. I don’t really have any metrics for this, but right around when I stopped training A+A style I went up to flagstaff and hiked a little under a half marathon with a friend at elevation. Breathing was noticeably more difficult at that altitude but I definitely would not have been able to keep up for that hike a year before.
If you look around online, Al Ciampa has written a ton about A+A training. Megan Kelly from the UK is another golden resource, as is Harald Motz. Anna Cannington is very experienced in and has written a great deal about A+A as well. I learned a lot from all of them, even doing some devoted swing programs of Megan’s, and the takeaways were very similar. Work hard, be consistent, keep it simple. A+A seems unorthodox compared to other training methods, but the underpinnings of good progression and effective training remain the same.
