Obstacle course racing has exploded in the last decade and is now a sport in its own right. In 2014, 272,752 people participated in a Spartan Race alone – and that doesn’t include other popular races like Tough Mudder and BattleFrog.

Why Obstacle Course Racing?

What possesses normal people to crawl through possibly contaminated mud and do an inane amount of burpees? In his article, Adventure Racing, Obstacle Course Racing, and Triathlons – Where Does It Stop?, coach Eric C. Stevens touched on one of the big reasons obstacle course racing is so popular:

It seems that races get us back in touch with ourselves while modern life is designed to do quite the opposite – to distract. Distractions also keep us from facing what it is that helps us move forward – fear. That said, races in and of themselves by their physical nature are metaphorical. The real work is to do the mental and spiritual work behind the physical, but that’s a different article.

On the subject of facing fears, it appears that Spartan Race co-founder Richard Lee concurs. “It’s all about facing your fears and having fun at the same time. Most people have never been covered in mud, jumped in a river, or climbed a high wall, but it gives you a great sense of accomplishment.”

But maybe you can handle mud and rivers. Maybe fear of failure is holding you back from jumping on the OCR bandwagon. If that’s the case, we have resources to help you get through your first obstacle course race.

Free 6-Week Training Plan

Master RKC Andrew Read put together an obstacle course training plan for people who don’t have a ten-foot wall to practice with. The plan incorporates the following elements:

• Power Cleans
• Grip Strength
• Single Leg Training
• Circuit Training

To learn more about this program, read Andrew’s article, 6 Week Training Plan for Your Obstacle Course, Tough Mudder, Spartan Race. To get the program in printable form, you can download a PDF here.

Don’t have six weeks? Well, hopefully you have four, because Andrew also put together an awesome four-week training plan. Read all about it in Andrew’s article, Free 4-Week Training Plan to Get You Spartan Race Ready. You can access the entire program by clicking here.

Advice From OCR Veterans

While competing on the popular TV show, American Ninja Warrior, parkour expert and Breaking Muscle coach Ben Musholt dislocated his shoulder on the last obstacle of the course. But it’s pretty impressive he made it that far!

Here are three tips and videos Ben shared to help with common OCR challenges. There are a lot more in his article, Training for the World’s Most Famous Obstacle Course: American Ninja Warrior.

1. Brachiate

Practice swinging through a jungle gym and across rows of rings like the ape that you are. Get comfortable hanging from one arm, while you swing and reach with your free hand. Don’t just swing in a straight line – challenge yourself to zigzag and even move through different elevations.

2. Practice Footwork

Being light on your feet is an absolute prerequisite for dominating an obstacle course. In parkour, the tic-tac is a skill where you strike the surface of an obstacle with one foot and change directions to land somewhere else with your other foot.

You can practice this by making a series of targets on the ground and striding between them, almost like a spread-out hopscotch grid. Once you are comfortable on flat ground, take it higher and try to run across a series of boulders or boxes. Make it harder by changing the surface from horizontal to slightly angled.

3. Build Explosive Upper Body Strength

The muscle-up and climbing dyno are two upper body strength skills that must be in your obstacle course toolkit. You should spend plenty of time drilling these movements, until you can whip them out accurately and without hesitation.

Similarly, legs-free rope climbing and campus boards should be worked on periodically. Clapping pull-ups are another good skill to develop the explosive upper body strength needed to succeed.

Fill in the Gaps

In Andrew Read’s article, April Luu: Apex Predator and Elite Spartan Race Competitor, Spartan Race champion April Luu shared some of her tips for training to win an obstacle course race. Two themes were weekly hard runs and adequate time for recovery, particularly in the week before a race:

With two hard runs per week and a session climbing an insane incline where she lives at 7,000 feet while wearing a weight vest, she focuses on quality rather than quantity to get results. With a background in racing 800s and the 4x400m in college and high school, Aprial has a good history of quality running in her legs. These days she doesn’t do track training but she still has time targets for every single run.

In the week leading up to a race April focuses on rest, foam rolling, and eating clean. One of the things she is most careful of is making sure she can always perform at her best. I was impressed by the way she strictly handles her race schedule so that she can peak at every event.

You might notice a trend in all this training advice, and it’s best summarized in Andrew’s article, The 3 Keys to Obstacle Course Racing Success. Andrew noted the three most common holes in OCR training:

1. Not enough running
2. No loaded carries
3. Not enough grip work

So whatever training plan you choose, make sure it includes all three of these elements. And don’t forget April’s advice to rest the week of the race. Best of luck in your event, and let us know how it goes!

More Like This:

• 5 Fitness Challenges That Will Strengthen Body and Mind
• How to Use Race Results to Prepare for Your Next Obstacle Course
• Taking the Adventures Outside the Gym

Photo 1 courtesy of Shutterstock

Photo 2 by By Senior Airman Jeremy Bowcock [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

The post A Winner’s Guide to Obstacle Course Racing appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Obstacle course racing (OCR) is growing in popularity year-on-year. With this growth in participation comes an increase in the number of people training specifically for OCR events. However, I often see three big mistakes when it comes to their training. Let’s look at what these errors are and how to avoid them.

The 3 Biggest OCR Training Mistakes

The three biggest holes I notice in OCR training boil down to running, loaded carries, and grip training. These issues are also right up there in terms of mistakes that cost people the most time on race day.

1. Running

The first and worst mistake you can make is to forget it’s a running race. Don’t look at all the obstacles and think you only have to run half a mile between each and think to yourself, “well, I can run 800m, so this will be easy.” Because if you plan to do well, you still need to run the entire course, which could be as much as half marathon distance (13.1 miles.)

2. Loaded Carries

At the World Championships held on the weekend, the guys doing the crazy Ultra Beast (30 miles of torture) had to carry two 50lb sandbags uphill. I’ve heard it was absolute carnage with people just dropping the bags and walking off the course. I’ve heard accounts of up to 25% of the field quitting because of that one obstacle.

But it’s not just sandbag carries, either. There are often bucket carries at Spartan events – in fact, it’s one of the obstacles you’ll find at nearly all the races. In Australia they use massive 120lb deadballs, which are difficult to pick up with wet, muddy hands, and even more difficult to carry the distance required.

3. Grip Work

The third mistake, grip strength, is one of those things that everyone seems to think they have enough of, right up until the point they find themselves doing thirty burpees for falling off the monkey bars. In a long race, with rope climbs, Tyrolean traverses, Hercules hoists, loaded carries, and heavy drags your grip takes a pounding. And the fatigue of distance running amplifies how easily fatigued your grip will become.

Here’s how I recommend you train each of these areas to prepare for race day.

Running

Firstly, you need to run. If you aren’t yet at the stage where you can run the distance non-stop, you need to work on that before you worry about how fast you can cover the distance. If you’re using an obstacle race to get up off the couch (the precise reason Joe de Sena founded Spartan in the first place) then please follow my walk/run plan to get started.

If you’re able to run the distance continuously, I’d suggest a plan that has four different runs plus an extra day in it. The four runs are:

• Easy aerobic
• Intervals
• Hills
• Long run

The extra day is for sandbag or pack work, but done walking. The week should be structured with the long run (up to two hours) on Saturday, with the sandbag or pack work done on the following day. Don’t be shy with the time for the pack day – go up to four hours.

Your legs will be tired after both of these days, so the next run will be Tuesday and be an easy aerobic run up to an hour in length. Don’t push the pace on this run, and don’t worry about hills – just an easy, flat run to shake the legs out.

The interval run is best done on a track. Something like 20 x 400m on a three-minute-interval will work well. Or 10 x 800m on six minutes. Make sure to warm up and cool down for this one as it will lead to some serious soreness, so give your body the best chance to fight it off.

Finally, the hill run fits well on a Thursday. I like doing this on a treadmill so I can moderate the incline. My favorite hill session is five sets of 1km above race pace at 4-5%, followed by 1km below race pace on flat so you can recover. The average of these 2km is your target race pace. Again, make sure to warm up and cool down before this, and don’t be fooled by this as it is still at least a 12km run.

Loaded Carries

Loaded carries need to be in every training session. If you’re not used to doing them you need to spend considerable time on them to gain proficiency at it. As an example of how efficient you can get at them, I recently had eight minutes to get off an airplane, get to the long-term car park, and then to the pet hotel my dog was at before they shut for the night. I grabbed both my carry-on bag and my girlfriend’s bag (it is easier to be balanced) and took off running through the airport, to the car park, and to the car. This was a ten-minute walk done in three minutes.

Now, I won’t lie, I was spent – my grip was fried, my traps were burning, and my lungs were heaving. But I got it done and we picked up our dog. If you plan to be truly Spartan -ready you will need to build up to loaded running (but that’s probably an entire article right there).

Don’t make the mistake of only doing farmer’s walks with easy-to-handle implements. Use overhead walks, rack walks, and sandbag carries. Load yourself asymmetrically and use odd objects. For Spartan you need to be ready for anything.

Grip Training

Finally, grip needs to be addressed. Some grip endurance will be handled with the loaded carries. Some more grip endurance will be taken care of with normal strength work, such as pull-ups and deadlifts. But what you need is high rep work to develop massive amounts of grip endurance – enough to last you the many hours you may be on course. A short set of ten reps isn’t going to do it.

This is a great place for two different types of grip work. High rep swings, both with a kettlebell and with clubbells, will help develop great grip endurance. I’m talking about sets of twenty-plus reps, and maybe even as high as fifty per set. Because clubbells are closer to brachiation than kettlebells are, they may actually be superior for grip development.

The other big thing that is going to develop grip endurance is hanging off objects. If you can vary the grip used, that will work even better. If you can hang off tree branches, stair railings, and the like you’ll wind up with a far better overall grip.

If all you have access to is a pull up bar don’t fret, as you can still change the grip each set. You can fold a towel over the bar to thicken the grip. You can drape the towel over the bar and hold onto the hanging ends. You can hold the bar with hands you’ve deliberately made slippery (putting soap in the hands is a favored strongman grip training method) and do hangs. For more fun, soap the hands and then do some kettlebell swings. Make sure no one is standing right in front of you when you do though.

Focusing on these three things – running, grip, and carries – will take care of your OCR plan.

Photo 1″Mountain Creek Super Spartan Race” by Senorjerome Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Photo 2 “IMG_9816” by John Ramspott Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Photo 3 courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post The 3 Keys to Obstacle Course Racing Success appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

In the parkour community, this movement, when performed from a hang, is known as a “climb-up.” It is a fundamental skill for getting yourself on top of an overhead structure. And aside from being a challenging and fun skill to master, the climb-up could just save your life someday. I’m not joking. Think about running away from an assailant or hightailing it to safety from a rushing flash flood. Being able to put some vertical distance between you and a threat is a great way to escape peril.

Now, most people with a solid baseline of physical fitness could probably get themselves on top of a wall if pressed to do so in an emergency. How fast he or she could do it is another matter. Not to be too dramatic, but when your life depends on it, speed and efficiency are of the utmost importance.

So, without further adieu, here is the fastest way (from a dead-hang) to get yourself on top of a wall using the climb-up:

1. Grasp the top of a wall with both hands, with as much palm surface area as you can.
2. Lower until your arms are almost fully extended and resting on the tension in your lats.
3. Position your feet on the wall so that they are staggered with one leg flexed and placed close to your torso. The other foot should be placed on the wall approximately eighteen inches lower. (Note: the first photo shows reversed foot placement. The author switched feet before climbing upward.)
4. In one explosive motion, drive your upper leg into the wall while pulling yourself upward with your arms.
5. Kick your lower leg backwards and circle it forward as you lift your chest above the height of the wall.
6. Pop your chest upward by forcefully pressing downward through your arms and simultaneously bringing both feet to land between your hands.
7. Stand up. You’re on top of the wall!

Sounds incredibly easy, right? The technique just described can actually be quite difficult to master and, unless you’re a motor-learning savant, you’ll probably find that you must first use a few intermediate steps.

Getting your elbows and then one knee on top of the wall before standing up is often referred to as a “struggle up,” but it can be a helpful first step. After that, skip the knee and try to place one foot on top of the wall at a time. As you get more proficient at exploding upward, the idea is to be able to pop upward and land on top of the wall in a squat with both feet simultaneously.

Ryan Ford, of APEX Movement and the Demon Drills YouTube Channel, has an excellent video demonstrating the different levels of climb-up proficiency. Watch it and see where you are at in your ability:

If you’re really having trouble getting the motion down, here are a few strengthening exercises to supplement your training:

• False grip hang – Dangle beneath a bar or from the wall, hanging on the tissue between your palms and your flexed wrists. This helps to build wrist strength and comfort in the starting position. (This muscle-up video includes an explanation of the false grip.)
• Cat hang pull ups – Hang beneath the lip of a wall with your arms straight and feet staggered. Pull your body up and try to bring your chin above the height of the wall before lowering and repeating.
• Wall dips – Positioning yourself above a wall with straight arms and your palms flat. Lower your chest to the wall and then press up lifting yourself back to the starting position. (Read this for more on this movement.)

Once you feel comfortable with a dead-hang climb-up, it’s fun to measure your efficiency with a simple benchmark test: five climb-ups for time. Hang beneath a wall, perform your first climb-up getting both feet on the wall and then lower yourself back down. Repeat the process until you’ve complete five full climb-ups. The timer starts from the initial dead-hang and stops once your feet land on the wall on the fifth rep.

What’s your best time? Can you guess how fast elite parkour athletes can crank out five reps?

Ten seconds.

Yep, you read that right. The best in the world can get themselves on top of a wall five times in a row in just ten seconds! Amazing. It gives you something to shoot for, doesn’t it?

There is a primordial pleasure in being able to get your body on top of an overhead structure. My guess is that once you learn the climb-up, it will start to have a prominent place in your bodyweight strength training.

Stay tuned for additional articles on how to apply the climb-up to functional situations, including running up a wall that is well above head height.

The post Get Up That Wall! Mastering the Parkour Climb-Up appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve seen your fair share of races popping up in your community. Tough Mudders, Spartan Races, Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathons, you name it. It seems there is an event for every imaginable concept. As America gets fatter, the irony is we also get fitter. Though there is a substantial overweight and sedentary population in our country, there is also a sizable fit and even über-fit one as well. And as people get in better shape they are in search of something more. Another ten minutes on the treadmill or five pounds off the scale doesn’t seem quite sufficient after you’ve been working out or running for a while. At some point people start to see what they can do and to compete – with themselves, against others, with the clock, and against Father Time.

Enter the race craze. It seems no facet of fitness is immune. There are CrossFit events, races up mountains and down, races for cures, and there is even a popular television show called The Amazing Race. Where I work, we’ve hopped on the bandwagon as well. Last week we put on an indoor “triathlon” that we called the Dri Tri. Now, I’ve done plenty of events before such as supported bike rides, fun runs, and relay races, but an indoor triathlon was new to me. Our version included a 2000m row on a water rower, 300 bodyweight reps in the weight room (burpees, squats, etc.), and a 5k run on the treadmill. People went nuts for it.

The adventure and obstacle-racing phenomenon is without question one of the shining and rising stars in fitness in recent years. Here in Colorado, you can run just about any race you can think of. You can run the steps at the various sports venues. You can go up to arguably the nation’s most famous concert venue, Red Rocks, and do fitness events there. There are races up the steps of tall buildings and races in and around every park in town, as well as every conceivable race up in the mountains. There’s even a race called The Running of the Bulls where race participants run a 1k, getting a head start running from the Denver roller derby team on skates. The roller derby gals, armed with Styrofoam bats and clubs, give chase to ‘gore’ runners trying to evade them.

You have to wonder where this craze will stop and what has brought all of this madness about. I remember years ago being captivated by watching the Eco-Challenge on the Discovery channel. Admittedly, I was sucked in to the drama of competition between teams that were racing up cliffs, down rivers, and through the woods on trails. The drama that unfolds on such television shows also unfolds for us in real life – setbacks, thrills, challenges, teamwork, victory, and defeat. Out there in nature and on those race trails we are looking for answers and finding meaning in our own journey. The question remains, why now, and why the popularity of racing adventure, obstacle, or otherwise?

It seems that races get us back in touch with ourselves while modern life is designed to do quite the opposite – to distract. Distractions also keep us from facing what it is that helps us move forward – fear. That said, races in and of themselves by their physical nature are metaphorical. The real work is to do the mental and spiritual work behind the physical, but that’s a different article. On the subject of facing fears, it appears that Spartan Race co-founder Richard Lee concurs. “It’s all about facing your fears and having fun at the same time. Most people have never been covered in mud, jumped in a river, or climbed a high wall, but it gives you a great sense of accomplishment.”

While the trend of racing continues to gain in popularity, racing in any sense is not a new concept. People like to compete and have run races since the beginning of time. A marathon is still just a run that is 26.2 miles as it was centuries ago, but now that rock ‘n’ roll is involved, people seem to have lost their minds for it. For 31 years now in Oregon, where I hail from originally, the state has hosted one of the largest and longest (200 miles) relay races in the world, the Hood to Coast Relay. Nowadays there are waiting lists just to enter a team in the race and over 18,000 people participate each year. People have always raced and will always continue to do so, but one thing is certain – we are living in peak race times.

It seems that people are increasingly out of the box when it comes to being active. It makes sense given that we are no longer satisfied with things that used to entertain us. Running on the treadmill just doesn’t cut it anymore. Treadmills now come equipped with a dock for your smart phone, Internet connections, and televisions built it. If you’ve spent any time around a seven year old lately, you’ll be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t speak iPad or have her hands attached to some sort of device. We see the same trends in sport and fitness. We want to be entertained and yet challenged at the same time. Perhaps racing represents this intersection and blend between two seemingly opposing concepts of fun and fit.

We as a society might well be suffering from some sort of collective attention deficit disorder, and these events are merely another example of the myriad of distractions at our disposal. Still, distracting or not, when it comes down to it, these events are a good thing. A race brings people together and builds community in a shared common goal of accomplishing something. Some compete to win, others compete with themselves, and others are just seeing if they can finish. Regardless, such events get people to focus on goals, better themselves, and stay fit. In short, races provide inspiration.

That said, inspirational or not, some of this stuff seems downright silly – freezing cold water, barbed wire, and electric shocks? I’ve thought about calling these race organizers up to offer my services of lacing up my gloves to punch people in the stomach as they cross the finish line. I mean, what’s the difference between a punch and a shock, and what’s the point, for that matter? Races I’m for, but some stuff seems more like outright stupidity than “tough.” My dad used to say, “You don’t have to fall off of a log to know what it is like to fall off a log.” I don’t need ice cold water or electrical shocks on my run thank you, but then again, I am a guy who’s taken plenty of punches over the years and many people find that towards the top of the list when it comes to stupidity. I guess we all have our thing.

In the end, I suppose all of us are trying to prove our worth and challenge ourselves to see what we can be. These events are part play, part competition, and part therapy. Each one of us longs to be a kid again sometimes, and running a race is a way for us to connect to our inner child. Running a race is also a way for us to prove ourselves right (or others wrong). As to the therapy, when we run the race, we do so to find our more about ourselves. To see if we have what it takes, to try, to compete, to win, to finish, or face defeat. I’m not sure what all of this madness is about, but at some point we all have to run the race to know that we can.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Adventure Racing, Obstacle Course Racing, and Triathlons – Where Does It Stop? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I’ve met plenty of physically-talented athletes who never seem to get it all together and make the most of their potential. Then there are a rare few who are just as tough mentally as they are fast and strong physically. Sitting and talking with April about racing you can’t help but feel sorry for the rest of the girls on the start line.

April burst onto the scene at Spartan Race, winning two “beast” category races (21km each) over two days – a feat never before accomplished. After that, people started to take notice of her. Fast forward to now and she’s won nearly every race she’s been in – with a worst result of third – and is leading the women’s points going into the Spartan Race season finale in Vermont.

Initially drawn to obstacle course racing (OCR) because she found running boring, April says that it tests a wide range of athletic skills. “Trail running and flat racing you can just condition to perform one thing. I’ve seen a lot of good runners come to try OCR and fail because they lack the all-round strength you need to get through obstacles.”

So how does a personal trainer, group exercise instructor, and mom become the competitive animal she is today?

April actually has a unique history, being the first woman to ever be deployed to a Special Forces unit as a parachute rigger. Prior to her arrival at the 82nd Airborne, it had previously only been the domain of men. As anyone who has been in the military will tell you – if you’re a woman in a male dominated field you better be tough and capable, because they’re going to test you twice as much as they do the men. Perhaps it was the time in the military that helped her develop her tough mindset, later moving to 10th Special Forces Group before getting out when she discovered she was pregnant with her first child.

When I asked April why Spartan Race, she replied, “Spartan Race challenges you both mentally and physically – it is the ultimate human sport. Not to mention it’s exhilarating, gruelling, and competitive.” She went on to add that she had initially started OCR as a way to build up clients for her personal training business. That has actually become so successful that she now runs a program called “A Spartan Gives Back” where she trains three of her clients for a race and tracks their progress.

One of the things I particularly like about Spartan Race is that it is a race. You won’t find many fancy dress costumes on the start line – people are there to race. But it’s not just about fast times either. The race has a code of ethics they swear by and one of the tenets is that “a Spartan leads.” When you have your clients following you to crawl through the mud, under barbed wire and climb up ropes, you’re doing a good job of leading.

But what I was most interested in was April’s training. I’ve long held the belief that great athletes don’t do anything differently than the rest of us other than perform basics at a much higher level. And when we talked training her program was as simple as it needed to be without over simplifying anything. Her strength program consists of basics like deadlifts, squats, single-leg deadlifts, sled work, crawling, and pull-ups.

Having the opportunity to work alongside April at the Spartan Group X course in Salt Lake City, Utah a few months ago I was amazed at her strength-to-weight ratio. One workout saw us outside in the blazing sun doing a variety of bodyweight movements in a circuit. One of those variations was simple push up holds, but with the hold in the bottom position. (Thanks to Joe DiStefano for that evil piece of genius). We all started off on the hot asphalt but as the rounds increased the numbers that could handle the heat of the tarmac decreased. The holds themselves were getting tougher and tougher, but it was the insane heat of the ground that was doing people in.

All except April, that is. She just kept alternately laughing away or swearing and holding that insane position for the entire workout, while we all retreated to the coolness of the grass to continue.

April’s running program is no different to her strength plan. With two hard runs per week and a session climbing an insane incline where she lives at 7,000 feet while wearing a weight vest, she focuses on quality rather than quantity to get results. With a background in racing 800s and the 4x400m in college and high school, Aprial has a good history of quality running in her legs. These days she doesn’t do track training but she still has time targets for every single run.

In the week leading up to a race April focuses on rest, foam rolling, and eating clean. One of the things she is most careful of is making sure she can always perform at her best. I was impressed by the way she strictly handles her race schedule so that she can peak at every event. In these early days of OCR, I think there are a lot of talented racers giving away victories by competing too often and not recovering adequately in between races. April’s strength coach, Aaron Knutson of Max Performance, oversees the entire plan to make sure she is always at the top of her game.

It would be easy when looking at April’s record to assume that she is just one of those lucky few who always nails it whenever she competes in anything. But things happen on the course and sometimes even the best stumble and fall, like recently when she took a bad spill in a race and recovered to come third, limping across the line. Speaking with her that week I know she was incredibly upset – not about coming third, but because the slip caused her to race well below her expectations. Said April, “I am always pushing my mind and body to its limits when I train. I have kids of my own and try to lead by example because they are always watching me. I know my weaknesses and work on them – that is the only way to get better.”

April’s mindset, and perhaps the reason for her success, becomes even more clear through these words that she shared with me: “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW your primary focus of your life.” – Eckhart Tolle

I’m pretty sure as Spartan Race grows, and the sport of OCR along with it, that we’ll be seeing a lot more of April Luu.

The post April Luu: Apex Predator and Elite Spartan Race Competitor appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

It’s that time of year again: Barbecues. Pool parties. And, best of all, American Ninja Warrior on NBC! If you’re as enthusiastic about the show as I am, then you’re probably found on Monday nights grinning wildly in front of your TV, watching athletes attempt the mother of all obstacle courses.

For those of you who tuned in last year, you might have caught my appearance on the Northwest Regional round. I owned the course right up until I dislocated my shoulder on the last obstacle. I made it up that gigantic ramp in true warrior fashion, heaving myself with one arm, cradling a dislocated shoulder on the other side.

Oh well. What can you do? At least I made it up!

You’ve probably noticed that two classes of athletes typically do well on the course: rock climbers and parkour practitioners (traceurs).

That’s because the competition demands an incredibly high degree of upper body strength, as well as balance and coordination. Rock climbers and traceurs excel at both those two skill sets. Thus, if you dream of getting on the show and making it all the way to the last stage, then you would be wise to take up the training styles of these two athlete groups.

Let me suggest a few workout features that you should definitely be focusing on to hone your ninja skills:

Crazy Grip Strength

Forget squeezing those iron spring-loaded grip trainers. You need to spend an insane amount of time hanging from your arms with your hands in a variety of grip positions.

Suspend your body off the ground while holding onto a mixture of horizontal and vertical obstacles. Ledges, rings, pull-up bars, PVC pipe, cloth curtains, and rope of different widths should definitely be in your training arsenal.

If you have a few dollars to spare, Metolius Rock Rings are a great product to help build grip strength and are fairly cheap.

Brachiate

Practice swinging through a jungle gym and across rows of rings like the ape that you are. Get comfortable hanging from one arm, while you swing and reach with your free hand. Don’t just swing in a straight line – challenge yourself to zigzag and even move through different elevations.

Bouldering

Get a membership at a local bouldering or rock climbing gym, and try to train there at least twice per week. Work on long traverses as well as fast vertical ascents.

Mix things up by carrying extra weight for a greater strength challenge. One of my favorite techniques was to wear a fanny pack loaded with 10lb ankle weights, but you could also just wear a weight vest.

Obstacle-Specific Training

As with any sport, you need to drill the specific movements that will be found in the competition. You’ll want to train on a large inverted quarter pipe, slanted walls, a cargo net, and a wide variety of balancing and hanging obstacles.

Many parkour gyms now offer replicas of the same obstacles that are on the competition. Likewise, if you have a big backyard, it would be worth it to have your buddies chip in and build as many features as you can. Or, if you get the invitation, try to make it out to David Campbell’s property in California. He has built a whole course for training!

Footwork

Being light on your feet is an absolute prerequisite for dominating an obstacle course. In parkour, the tic-tac is a skill where you strike the surface of an obstacle with one foot and change directions to land somewhere else with your other foot.

You can practice this by making a series of targets on the ground and striding between them, almost like a spread-out hopscotch grid. Once you are comfortable on flat ground, take it higher and try to run across a series of boulders or boxes. Make it harder by changing the surface from horizontal to slightly angled.

Balance

The greater you can refine your balance, the better prepared you will be for overcoming dynamic obstacles. Start by getting comfortable walking on a balance beam, then a rail, and finally a slack line.

Wobble boards, skateboards, and stability balls are other tools that you can use to challenge yourself. And, don’t stop with just standing or walking across balance challenges. Work on jumping from one unstable surface to another, forcing rapid balance adjustments.

Explosive Upper Body Strength

The muscle-up and climbing dyno are two upper body strength skills that must be in your obstacle course toolkit. You should spend plenty of time drilling these movements, until you can whip them out accurately and without hesitation.

Similarly, legs-free rope climbing and campus boards should be worked on periodically. Clapping pull-ups are another good skill to develop the explosive upper body strength needed to succeed.

These are just few suggestions. Your main focus should be to get creative in your training and shoot for a mix of hanging upper body strength and lower body balance/coordination skills.

And finally, don’t neglect the mental training needed to prepare for competition. Hone your mental focus. And, use visualization to see yourself making it all the way to the end of the run.

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I first came across this concept when I read Charlie Francis’ work in Training for Speed. He famously had Ben Johnson hit heavy squats in the gym before heading outside to run blazing fast sprints. This concept of “if it wires together, it fires together” has crept into the modern fitness world too. CrossFit is perhaps the most famous example of that, training multiple fitness qualities at once in an effort to breed all-around athleticism.

Russian sports science great Yuri Verkhoshansky had a lot to say about this method of training, in particular on ways to use it to achieve explosive strength development. Let’s segue a little bit and assume that we actually want some useful, real world strength – the kind a soldier might need. A soldier’s role might entail a slow patrol into enemy territory while wearing heavy loads and then a flurry of activity during a firefight. Given the non-specific nature of combat training, it is difficult to state with any kind of specificity how one exercise will carry over to battlefield performance but one thing is for sure – the stakes are high and there is a need for a huge blend of physical attributes.

If we’re planning to make the most of this style of training the first thing I suggest you do is read my article on common sense programming. Placing the highest demand qualities at the start of the week is vital if we’re looking to get the most of these varied sessions. One of the general rules with this type of training is not to mix qualities, as the body responds best to a single focus in each session.

A sample session might be exactly as Francis had Johnson perform. Do a 3RM squat then run a hard 60m before resting for ten minutes and repeating. Triathletes will be familiar with this kind of session, but they use it to practice two different sports skills by performing brick workouts.

At this point the general rules state that the only session that should follow something so demanding is an easy endurance session. Athletes should be careful not to schedule two hard sessions back to back. And in the case of military operators putting two such sessions together could see them so exhausted on their next patrol they fail to do their job adequately.

But we can use this same premise within our workouts, too, by combining a hard exercise such as heavy deadlifts with an exercise like the Brettzel or the windmill. Hard is followed by easy, and by combining those two within the same session we will get increased strength and mobility at the same time.

But now how do we make this fit with running, an essential skill for the military? My testing ground for all this is obstacle racing, as that’s the closest I can get these days to combat situations. My base running plan was designed by former marathon world record holder and world champion Rob de Castella, so there’s nothing wrong with it as far as making me run better goes. The trick is in where to schedule which session.

It’s based around four runs per week and one mixed session. The mixed session I think of as my long brick. Triathletes will be familiar with brick workouts. Bricks are typically two of the three sports linked together in the same format you’d race them, so swim/bike or most commonly bike/run. It’s very common to do a long ride/short run brick within Ironman training and my Sunday session is based on that. Here’s how it works:

1. Two easy runs per week of thirty to forty minutes. This is not the time to go out and try to run hard and fast. These are easy, aerobic, recovery runs. They are ideally placed on the days after your hard strength sessions, or even later the same day if you can tolerate two sessions per day.

2. Another run per week that is hard intervals. This session is all about learning to tolerate time spent at your threshold and is best done in longish intervals of 1km. After a decent warm up you’ll need to do three to five hard 1km efforts with good recovery. I generally run the 1000m in about five minutes and rest another two, leaving on a seven-minute cycle.

3. A long run each week that is somewhere between one and two hours depending on ability and needs. This run should be nearly entirely aerobic but the last twenty minutes should be hard.

4. The final session of the week is our complex session, working on multiple qualities and simulating race- or combat-like situations. My goal during these sessions is to go out on the trails and do hill work. Think of that as my strength component. I run the flats hard, so there’s speed. Finally, at any track junction I do calisthenics. That’s power endurance and matches the kinds of demands needed during obstacle course racing or during combat.

It’s not unusual for me to do hundreds of reps of various exercises this way. From push ups to burpees to lunges, squats, and various crawling patterns, I’m only limited by my imagination or my fatigue. Old school boxers used to do the same when they did roadwork, pausing every now and then to do calisthenics or shadow box, tying in neural pathways so that under stress they could still perform.

This leaves me a few opening each week to hit some hard strength work – pull ups or rope climbs, plenty of tough pressing variations such as weighted dips, and single leg work, yet still leave me fresh enough to maximize my running.

This old school method is a great way to get a lot of work done while making sure the nervous system is making the connections we need for when the going gets tough. There’s nothing more frustrating than watching someone who looks like Tarzan play like Jane. It doesn’t mean that every session should end up as a random mish-mash of ideas because you’ve got ADD. It still means sticking to a plan, but learning to use this idea to maximize your time and leverage the body’s adaptation.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post If It Fires Together, It Wires Together: Tying the Body Together in Training appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Obstacle racing is the new boot camp. Going back a few years boot camps were all the rage. You’d have a bunch of pretend tough guys (in most cases, although some were legit ex-military PTIs) parading around in camouflage or other tactical gear, and barking orders at people desperate to get in shape. The reason boot camps were so popular came down to two things:

1. It gave people a taste of what it is like in the military.
2. Training in a group helps people stay committed as not only do they enjoy the workouts but there is peer pressure at work to keep people coming back even when they don’t feel like it.

And those are two of the big draws for obstacle racing, too. You can do it as a team challenge with events like Tough Mudder or choose to do individual races like Spartan Race, but in both cases you will be amongst large groups of people and you will get to run through various obstacles (although I must be honest and say in all the times I ran various obstacle courses in the military I never once had to run through a bunch of electrified wires).

But how do you train for one of these things if you don’t have a ten-foot wall to climb or a bunch of pipes to crawl through? I’m going to assume that if you have decided to sign up for a mud run that you can at least run. If you’re not a runner at this point then please look at my running break-in plan. On top of that we’re also going to add some strength work.

The twist to the strength work is that we can’t allow ourselves to be dogmatic about how we train. The thing about events like an obstacle course race is that there is no way you can actually train for them short of being on the course. They’re incredibly non-specific, so our training needs to be broader based than usual. This doesn’t mean we need to go crazy and start trying to cram everything plus the kitchen sink into our sessions, but where I would normally suggest picking a few exercises and getting very good at them, for events like this we need to deliberately expand our training selections.

What do I mean? Here are the elements you should include:

Power Cleans

The power clean is a long time favorite exercise of mine. It gives me a lot of benefits for a single movement and allows me to use a lot of weight. But for events like this we’ll be better off not just using power cleans but using every variation we can come up with. So it might be power cleans, hang power cleans from various positions, full cleans, and all forms of clean pulls from both the floor and the hang.

Grip Strength

I’m also a firm believer that grip strength and the ability to pull yourself up are important for climbing walls, ropes, and the other odd shaped obstacles that need to be navigated. So we’ll need pull-ups too, but we need a wide variety of them.

Single Leg Training

Since spending a lot of time running getting ready for an Ironman, I’ve fallen in love again with single leg training. You get big strength increases and improvements in your movement (which can actually be assessed via the FMS), but miss out on a lot of the spinal compression you get from bilateral leg training. But again, we need a wide variety to satisfy this element of the unknown that we will encounter during the mud run.

Circuit Training

We also need to incorporate elements of circuit training into our own training so that we get used to accessing our strength under stress. This kind of power endurance work is often used by people in the mistaken belief that it is all they need, but you still need to include straight high-load strength work in your training up until about a week out.

I’ve put together a six-week training plan that will prepare you for an obstacle course. To get it in printable form, you can download a PDF here.

Download a printable PDF of this 6-week training plan.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

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