Good Ideas for Strength & Conditioning Class..

The gym I work out at features some strength and conditioning classes catered to both men and women. Typically when I hear group fitness it sounds pretty cheesy but our gym does a good job of giving people a legit workout in 45 mins. Its a combination of resistance training and cardio. Kinda like cross fit, except for the types of movements and how they do it is just not my style. I like giving people benchmarks but I prefer safer, functional forms of resistance training whenever possible, and if I'd have them do a powerlifting movement it would be slow and methodical, not part of the timed workout.


Anyways, I always appreciate ideas for workouts to add to my arsenal. Anyone have any good ones? Thanks in advance.

Bad news: powerlifting movements, and common assistance exercises in powerlifting, are the foundation of most quality strength programs, whether people are training to be powerlifters or not. It may be appropriate to do variations that are quicker to learn/less technical, but you're still going to want to have the class doing squats, deadlifts/hinges, vertical pushes, horizontal pushes, vertical pulls and horizontal pulls. Doesn't have to be 1RM training necessarily, but if those movements aren't in the class, I doubt the class could live up to its name.

[QUOTE=rdferguson;1027460643]Bad news: powerlifting movements, and common assistance exercises in powerlifting, are the foundation of most quality strength programs, whether people are training to be powerlifters or not. It may be appropriate to do variations that are quicker to learn/less technical, but you're still going to want to have the class doing squats, deadlifts/hinges, vertical pushes, horizontal pushes, vertical pulls and horizontal pulls. Doesn't have to be 1RM training necessarily, but if those movements aren't in the class, I doubt the class could live up to its name.[/QUOTE]

This(for the most part).

I understand when you say you don't want to make the major powerlifting movements part of a timed workout, but as long as the intensity of the exercise isn't maximal, they should be fine. You wouldn't want someone who can only deadlift 400 lbs, deadlifting 315 for sets of 6 during one of these workouts, but 225-275 would be ok as long as they focus on their form.