Burn the Ships August '26 Edition

The Four Horsemen of Hardship

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.

If Two Percent is a cult, these Burn the Ships workouts are our Kool-Aid.

Burn the Ships workouts are hard, safe, and effective. They improve your strength, cardio, movement quality, and mindset—and, in turn, your life.

Members of the Two Percent community do the workout every weekend—a bunch of us satellites, spread out across the world, all sweating and improving together as one extended network.

One truly tough workout a week tends to be the sweet spot: 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.

For each workout, we give scaled versions and exercise swaps, so anyone and everyone can do them. That is to say, you.

Burn the Ships: August 2026

On Wednesday, we covered how the strength and conditioning team at the University of South Carolina Football is taking an evolutionary view of elite fitness to train its players.

Luke Day, head S&C coach, leans into what he calls “The Four Horsemen of Hardship.” They’re four movements humans used that shaped the human body and turned us into apex predators: crawling, carrying, covering ground, and changing levels.

By taking workouts out of the gym and focusing on the Four Horsemen, Luke has built what is arguably the fittest team in NCAA football.

Luke designed today’s workout, and it’s based around The Four Horsemen.

It builds a potent balance of strength and endurance—and transfers over to life and aging well.

Let’s roll...

---

🏔️ Quick favor: Send me your Misogi

We’re updating our Misogi guide. If you’ve done a Misogi in the last two years, reply to this email and tell me what you did. If you consider it a Misogi, it counts. Provide any details you want.

Again, just reply to this email.

🎙️ Two Percent podcast: Improving Animal Welfare Without Going Vegan

I talked to Dan Shannon—a 30-year vegan and CEO of The Humane League, one of the biggest and most effective animal welfare organizations—about a heretical position he recently took. Dan says the animal welfare movement needs to embrace meat eaters. Eighty percent of Americans support laws that improve the welfare of factory farmed animals. His goal: welcome more people into the movement to incite change at the corporate level to improve the lives of millions of factory farmed animals. We talked about that, whether veganism is any healthier, easy ways to eat more plants, and more. It’s an important conversation.

• Listen here.

• Watch here.

💪 The Best Nutrition App I’ve Found: Macrofactor

MacroFactor uses dynamic adjustment, a scientifically validated formula to help you find the right amount of food for your goals. Other apps work on guesswork—leaving you eating too much or too little. It helped me find “enough” food for me, and my fitness and recovery improved. Read more of the science here. Get a free 14-day MacroFactor trial here. Use code TWOPCT.

🧪 Check out Function Health

Function offers 5x deeper insights into your health than typical bloodwork. The info can guide you into feeling better every day. It helped me identify a mineral insufficiency—and was cheaper than my insurance. Go to my page here to sign up, receive a discount, and pay just $340.

---

This Month’s Workout: Carry What You Kill

Why the name?

• On Wednesday, we covered how and why the University of South Carolina is changing college football training by leveraging four key movements humans evolved to do.

• Covering ground and carrying makeup two of those four movements.

• Our species is unique in our ability to run great distances in the heat and carry weight. We’d run down animals, kill them, then carry the meat back to camp. Hence the name, Carry What You Kill.

Why it works

• In a presentation on his training methods, Luke said: “When we came to the part of The Comfort Crisis about carrying and how it gave us a predatorial edge, we decided to add it to our long runs. Everyone runs, and everyone says they are training the demanded energy systems of football. But if we are not including a skill that made us the food chain champions, are we really developing our players to their fullest potential? The result: We took a page from legendary Michigan Strength Coach Mike Gittleson’s ‘Getting Yards’ drill and married it to (carrying).”

• He continued, “The result was a difficult aerobic and cardiovascular demand paired with a loaded chassis demand expressed via the gait pattern while in a fatigued state; The ‘sweet spot,’ as Michael Easter puts it.” Translation: It forces you to carry and cover ground while tired. That builds endurance, functional strength, and toughness.

• “I realized we needed to call this drill ‘Carry What you Kill,’” Luke said. “Carry What You Kill asks our players to be strong while they run—and run while being strong. That’s what made humans who we are.”

Equipment needed

• Something heavy-ish that you can carry. A sandbag is best (that’s what I’ve listed in the workout, and what the Gamecocks use).

• If you don’t have a sandbag, you can get one from Amazon in 48 hours for $35.

• You can also use a heavy medicine ball, a ruck, a bag of sand from Home Depot, etc. Ideally, this weight is anywhere from ¼ to ½ of your body weight.

Time commitment

• This should take you between 35 and 75 minutes.

Song I’m listening to while doing this workout

• Sandstorm. It plays in the University of South Carolina football stadium at kickoff and whenever the team needs it during the game. Here’s a way-too-in-depth story from ESPN about how a song from a Finnish DJ took over the Gamecock football stadium. (And yes, despite our commitment to decency, we’re listening to electronica. I don’t make the rules. I just follow them.)

If this workout were an animal, it would be a:

• Gamecock. Obviously.

A note about this workout:

• Luke and I collaborated to adapt Carry What You Kill for Two Percent. The Gamecocks do a different version of the workout as an end to a day of training. Here’s what the team does:

• “I’m not sure how hard our drill would be if you just did it on its own, as a standalone,” said Luke. “It’s so hard for us because we’ve done an hour and a half of brutal work before it, and you’ve exhausted all of your capacities at that point.”

• To make the workout a tough enough standalone, Luke and I added more rounds and greater distances, and included crawling and a level change, the other two fundamental human movements.

How to do it

From here, you’ll learn:

• Exactly how to do the Carry What You Kill workout.

• The full breakdown of reps and rounds for your fitness level and time.

• Substitutions and scaled versions of the workout so anyone can do it, no matter your equipment or fitness level.

• Videos of each movement.

The Workout

Now move on to the workout. Do the exercises in the following order, moving from one to the other.