At The BTG, the majority of our members are not competitive athletes, nor do they have jobs that require them to maintain a high level of fitness year-round (E.G. front-line first responders, active duty military, etc.). As a result, we’ve often had folks ask “what the heck do you guys train so hard for?”
The short version is pretty simple - to just kick ass at life, able to meet any challenges that come our way with a balanced spectrum of physical abilities, and to maintain those abilities for as long as possible. To borrow a phrase from Dr. Peter Attia, our aim is “to be the most kick-ass 100-year olds possible.”
Where that gets a bit more complicated is in the details. What constitutes a “balanced spectrum of physical abilities”? If we have no specific demands from a sport or our work, how do we determine where we need to focus our energies?
To understand that, I need to tell a different story.
You Need to Walk The Talk
Back when I started my own fitness journey in my early 30’s, my focus was all on brief, high-intensity training efforts, and explosive power. I gravitated toward that because it was where I was naturally talented, and because it lent itself well to the gung fu training I started at the same time. Along the way, that morphed into some heavier strength training as well, with me eventually working my way up to both squatting and deadlifting double my bodyweight or better, alongside pulling off some pretty crazy feats of explosive power, like a 9’ standing broad jump and a 62” box jump.
When I began working as a trainer, that focus really dovetailed well with a lot of my clients’ bases of endurance and conventional cardio training. Many of them were runners, or did lots of steady-state cardio at the gym on their own, and I was always telling them “you need to do the stuff you’re not good at to improve” in convincing them that training hard and heavy with me was the right thing to do. Many of them developed into much more broadly-talented athletes as a result, when they found that the added strength and power from what we did actually enhanced their running, etc.
Along the way, starting in 2012, I dabbled a bit with shorter-distance running, managing to get my 5K race time down around 22 minutes as I helped a client prepare to run a 10K at the same event (in which she was on the podium for her age group). Anything longer than that, however, forget about it - I wasn’t interested.
Finally, in 2015, it dawned on me that I was being a complete hypocrite and was avoiding endurance work, not because IT sucked, but because I sucked at it. So, I decided to remove my head from my ass and see what I could do with a longer event.
Of course, I didn’t just want to run a marathon or something boring like that, so instead, my search led me to obstacle course races. Some friends had run Tough Mudder in Whistler, but it sounded a bit lame with its “novelty” obstacles like the Arctic Enema, greased monkey bars and electric shock field, and even back then it was getting too crowded on the course, and there was lots of standing around waiting for obstacles from the reports I had gotten. I wanted something physically gruelling that would really take me out of my comfort zone and make me push harder for longer than I had ever contemplated doing before.
…and that’s how I ended up signing up for the Spartan Race Sun Peaks Beast in September 2015. How hard could it be? My assistant, Julia, and two of our members (brothers Scott and Dillon) all signed up. We had no idea what we were in for, and we did not at all adequately prepare for the race.
Alarm bells really started going off in my head the night before the race, while relaxing in the hot tub at the hotel with other competitors. They were all chatting back and forth about how this was their fourth or sixth or whatever race this season, and then they turned to me, and the conversation went like this:
Them: “How about you?”
Me: “Oh, this is my first one.”
Them: “Like, your first one this season?”
Me: “No, my first one ever.”
Them: “And you chose THIS one? Are you f-ing crazy?”
Me: “What do you mean?”
Them: “This is one of the hardest Spartan races in North America, dude. You’re going to die.”
OK, so they didn’t really say I was going to die - that last part was just in my head. For me, the race certainly exceeded my expectations - after an hour-long slog up the side of a mountain off the start, after the first mud obstacle, my quads seized rigid. I spent the next five-hours-plus having to repeatedly stop and will my legs to work. But you know what? They did, though not well. It wasn’t pretty by any stretch of the imagination, but we got through it. I was absolutely destroyed for the better part of a week after. My neighbour had to help me out of my car and up the driveway, and my wife had to undress me and help me shower after the four hour drive home.
It wasn’t the physical effect on my body that was the real shocker to me, that first Beast experience absolutely blew my mind for two reasons.
First, there was the discovery that my body could not only function, but perform reasonably, well beyond where my brain told me it was time to quit. I mean, I went HARD in workouts before that, but I could always stop if I felt like I was “done”. The Beast gave me no option but to keep moving forward, not least because I was the jackass that coerced my three teammates into running the race with me, so I could NOT be the one to say “I quit”. That race taught me that I could suffer A LOT, and still keep moving forward for a long-ass time.
Second, the race really laid out plain as day for me that it demanded a balance of physical competencies like nothing else I’d ever encountered. If you ran the race as intended, moving as quickly as you were able, attempting every obstacle, and doing every single f-ing burpee if you failed, it absolutely punished specialists and it tested your will and mental resilience.
“Runners” got their asses kicked by the obstacles (especially the heavy carries / lifts and the tire flip). Strength and power guys like me got our asses kicked by the terrain. Just about everybody got their asses kicked by the burpees, which are really good for nothing except making you totally gassed for whatever the hell you have to do next. The course layout was a total mind-screw, with seemingly endless climbs, and an abrupt turnaround sending you straight back up the mountain just when you thought you were reaching the finish.
You had to be able to cover ground quickly and efficiently. You had to lift, push, pull, carry and drag heavy shit over awkward terrain. You had to move your own bodyweight through space, over, under, across and hanging from all kinds of apparatus. You had to be able to get the crap kicked out of you over and over, and still continue forward. You had to either be able to keep your head in the game, or be able to just lose your shit and get it back together, over and over and over. Plus, you got to throw a spear and jump over fire.
It was horrific. It was the most physically terrible thing I’d ever done. It was PERFECT.
The Demands of Spartan Racing Provide The Framework
Thinking about it the week after that first Beast, the balanced spectrum of physical abilities demanded by the Spartan Race are a great analogue for what a really well-rounded, “fit” individual in real life would look like. I was (and still am) so enthusiastic about it that I later became a Spartan SGX Level 1 Coach, and am currently pursuing my SGX Level 2 certification. I’ve also completed another 13 Spartan Races in the three-and-a-half years since, and along the way have helped dozens of other people complete their first Spartan Races as well.
I might sound like I got a little obsessed with Spartan Races…and that might be right! However, I still believe that the abilities and attributes needed to be successful on the Spartan course really are a great framework for the kind of fitness I’d want to have as a “kick-ass 100-year-old”.
I’ll go into each of these and how we train them in more detail in the next parts of this “Why We Train” series, but here’s a basic breakdown of how I see those attributes:
Resilience - both physical and mental / emotional resilience. This really is the #1 characteristic we’re after. All the others are pretty much equal to each other, and all contribute to how resilient you are, but resilience is what allows you to get after it day after day, and overcome all the crap that life throws your way. It’s not feeling the “old man aches” after doing a day of physical work, and being able to haul your suitcase up four floors of stairs when that “great deal” on a little holiday apartment in Europe doesn’t quite pan out as expected.
Strength - more specifically, relative strength. You need to be strong, but you also have to carry the engine. It’s no good being able to deadlift 500 pounds when you have to carry 300 pounds of bodyweight up a mountain (or through life). That’s why we base all of our strength training goals and testing in the gym as a percentage of bodyweight, and also why bodyweight movements play such a big part in our training. It’s still awesome to be able to crush a heavy barbell set, because I love me some deadlifts, but it’s even more awesome to do that with a barbell that weighs the same as you do (or more)!
Power - in physics, power = force x velocity. Being able to move an enormously heavy object slowly can be equivalent in power to moving a lighter object more quickly, therefore greater raw strength (force) does not necessarily equal higher power, because a point is reached where velocity is traded off for that greater force output. Our aim is to move that point further and be able to express high power output in all movement patterns - hip hinge, squat, lunge, pulling, pressing, and throwing.
Movement Fluency - being able to move your body through space with efficiency, control, balance, fluidity and grace is how I would define this. Being controlled and balanced but static is no good. Being mobile and flexible without control is also no good. Learning to execute movements with tension only where it is needed (rather than all over) is also a crucial component of movement fluency.
Anaerobic Threshold / Power Endurance - being able to sustain a high work-rate for a shorter duration, recover, then do it again repeatedly is how I would define this. Being able to perform both unloaded and externally-loaded work in this way is crucial - it’s no good to be able to just sprint over and over, but have carrying something kick the crap out of you.
Aerobic Endurance - defining this is simple, but quantifying it can be tricky. You can define it as being able to sustain a moderate-to-high cardiovascular load for an extended period of time, but how long? How high a load? Steady-state or varied demands (E.G. flat road / treadmill running vs. trail running / hiking)? I have some specific ideas on this that we’ll get into in a later article, but for now, just know that being able to go long is just as important as being able to go hard when you are trying to be a “balanced” individual.
Again, we’ll look at each of the above in more detail in future articles, but there you have what I see as the basic framework for the “balanced spectrum of physical abilities” to kick ass at life, that may just also help you do pretty well on a Spartan Race course! ;)
Any questions or comments, fire away! I should have the next part of this series out in a week or so.
—-Coach JP