Housekeeping
Full access to our Burn the Ships workouts is for Members of Two Percent.
Burn the Ships with us. Become a Member to get the workout (which anyone can do) and video of how to do every exercise:
Shoutout to our partners:
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The post
It’s the first Friday of the month—which means it’s time to Burn the Ships.
On the first Friday of every month, we publish a new Burn the Ships workout for Members only.
Members of the Two Percent community do the workout every weekend—a bunch of us satellites, all sweating and improving together as one extensive network.
Burn the Ships workouts are safe and effective. They improve your strength, cardio, movement quality, mindset, and—in turn—your life.
We’ve provided scaled versions and exercise swaps, so anyone and everyone can do them. That is to say, you.
In other words, we’re pushing edges and improving safely. It’s easy to be hard but hard to be smart.
I live in Las Vegas, a town built on the luck of the draw.
Humans have been gambling since the Paleolithic period. Our ancestors used an early form of dice called astragali. Six-sided dice date back to 3,000 B.C. Playing cards appeared in the 9th century.
And so, in this month’s Burn the Ships workout, we’re going to do a bit of gambling … each of your weekly workouts depends on the luck of the draw.
Before we reveal the workout, here’s a quick reminder of why we do one hard workout a week. Skip to “This month’s workout” if you’re familiar with our big why.
The case for one tough weekly workout
Section summary: Doing one tough workout a week seems to be the sweet spot for health and fitness.
I started doing one tough workout every Friday after reporting inside Gym Jones roughly 14 years ago. I’ve maintained the practice.
There’s magic in pushing it once a week.
First, there are the brain benefits. The practice makes me less insane.
Scientists at King’s College in London analyzed 53 studies on how intense exercise impacts mental health.
They found that it led to “improvements in mental wellbeing, depression severity, and perceived stress compared to non-active controls, and small improvements in mental wellbeing compared to active controls.”
In other words, intense exercise has a mental edge compared not only to not exercising (duh), but also to regular-paced exercise.
Intense exercise also—obviously!—comes with physical upsides.
It has a slight edge over less intense exercise for increasing VO2 max, which is associated with all sorts of good physical outcomes. A rule of thumb: the higher your VO2 max, the farther you are from death, disease, and decay.
TL;DR: All exercise helps. But it makes sense to go hard sometimes.
What’s “sometimes?”
The smartest trainers I regularly speak with suggest that one tough workout a week is the sweet spot for health and performance (info on that here).
More than that, and we tend to get burned out and beat down.
Less than that, and we miss out on some health and performance upsides.
Enter Burn the Ships.
This month's workout: Luck of the Draw
Why the name
I’ve always been fascinated by gambling.
It’s a metaphor for life, which—like a card game—has plenty of swings: sometimes we’re up, other times we’re down, and where we land is often out of our control.
This month we’re leaning into that. Your workout will be determined by the luck of the draw.
Where should I do this workout?
Anywhere.
Time commitment
That depends on the luck of the draw …
Equipment needed
You’ll choose your exercises.
You can do this workout entirely without equipment.
Or you can involved weights. Choose a sandbag, medicine ball, weighted ruck, etc.
A deck of playing cards. This is of utmost importance.
What I’m listening to while doing this workout
I created this gambling-centric playlist just for this month’s workout.
The workout: Luck of the Draw
Here’s Luck of the Draw.
The warmup
Start with a warmup. Take five-ish minutes to stretch and mobilize your joints. The Two Percent warmup is good for this.
The workout
Watch the video above, where I walk you through the workout.
First: grab a deck of cards.
Next: Select one exercise from each of the five categories below. The categories collectively provide a workout that hits all the fundamental human movements. As always, we have video of each exercise below.
