I am not a big fan of running. However, I am a big fan of being alive. As I work my toward the mid-fifties I want make the best of the years ahead of me. I found a great follow in Dr. Peter Attia who's focus is on longevity. He recommends three hours of zone two cardio a week. This seems to be a sweet spot for optimizing mitochondrial function which provides for a plethora of health benefits.
Three hours of zone two running a week puts me anywhere from 12-15 miles depending on how I am feeling. This is a lot of work on the legs. I quickly noticed I was not recovering. As with most things we are looking for adpatation so I kept pushing. Still, I was not recovering.
Fortunately I have access to the very guy who created 5/3/1. As with most things, Jim told me exactly what I didn't want to hear. The obvious answer was, I can't train legs as hard as was when I wasn't running. They should be trained hard only once a week and even then, not as hard as they had been.
Now because I still wanted to train my legs twice a week, I came up with the following. For my squat I am using 5's Pro which has no AMRAP. I am not doing any supplemental sets for my squat either. For the deadlift, I am solely doing the supplemental work of 3 sets of FSL. For those of you not familiar with 5/3/1 programming, this has me more or less just trying to maintain my leg strength and size.
As soon as I made this change, my legs started to recover. My running was improving and I was able to get through my lower body training days. Much like I always learn the hard way, you can't get bigger, better conditioned, and leaner all at the same time. You need to focus on one at a time.
