Jan 23, 2012
The bear is one of my favorite conditioning workouts. For those of you who don’t know, the bear consists of 5 movements that bring the bar from the ground, to over your head, to a full squat, over your head again and back to the ground. The movements are a power clean, front squat, push press, back squat, and push press. These are performed without letting go of the bar. The ideal way of completing this complex is to keep the bar moving at all times.
There are two ways that I know this workout can be completed; however there are probably many more ways these movements can be put together. The first way that these movements, what I’ll call the classic bear, can be done is to do 7 of each exercise before going on to the next. I have used this type of complex to gain muscular endurance in a longer time domain. I was definitely well conditioned after doing this complex; however I did not use this rep scheme when I was in a strength gaining phase.
My favorite way to do the bear, let’s call it the heavy bear, is to do each part of the complex once for maximum weight. Instead of using a fixed weight like the classic bear, the heavy bear is done for maximum load for the 5 reps. This complex was very helpful for me when I was training for strength in weightlifting because it provides a good general strength workout with just enough conditioning for someone training to lift a max single.
The heavy bear trains a small amount of conditioning, while staying under the 20s rough time frame for the ATP/CP energy system (more on that in later posts). It helped me to stay conditioned and tolerate longer workouts without ruining my maximal effort strength.
What kinds of weight should you be using on this? If you don’t know, you should ask a coach. I’m not even going to tell you what weights I used because if you don’t know what you can do for these exercises you should ask someone and if do you what weights to use you probably don’t care what I have to say about the issue.
