Burn the Ships December 2025
Hallelujah! holy sh*t! Where's the Tylenol?
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.
Members of the Two Percent community do the workout every weekend—a bunch of us satellites, spread out across the map, all sweating and improving together as one extended network.
Burn the Ships workouts are hard, safe, and effective. They improve your strength, cardio, movement quality, and 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.
We’re pushing edges and improving safely. It’s easy to be hard but hard to be smart.
The Holidays are here. We’re all pressed and stressed—scrambling to buy gifts, closing out a year of work, and prepping to spend time with our relatives.
As Ellen Griswold put it in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation:
“I don’t know what to say, but it’s Christmas and we’re all in misery.”
We all want to maintain our fitness over the holidays, but our time is limited, and we need to make our workouts quick.
So this month’s Burn the Ships workout is fast. It’s hard. It packs a lot of work into a little bit of time.
In keeping with the Christas Vacation theme, we’re quoting Clark Griswold and calling it “Hallelujah! Holy sh*t! Where’s the Tylenol?”
When you finish this workout—just like Clark—you’ll be tempted to say, “Hallelujah! Holy …” you get the point.
But you’ll be fitter for it.
Here’s our roadmap:
First, we’ll cover the science of why one tough weekly workout is the non-negotiable sweet spot for both physical and mental health.
Then, we’ll unpack the story behind Hallelujah! Holy sh*t! Where’s the Tylenol? You’ll learn why it’s so effective when time is limited.
Finally, I’ll give you the complete Hallelujah! Holy sh*t! Where’s the Tylenol? workout, with exact steps, full videos, scaled versions, and exercise and equipment swaps to get it done (even if you’re stuck at Uncle Eddie’s for the holidays).
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The case for one tough weekly workout
Section summary: One challenging workout per week is ideal for health and fitness.
There’s magic in pushing it once a week. First, there are the brain benefits.
Scientists at King’s College London analyzed 58 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.”
Translation: intense exercise doesn’t just beat doing nothing (duh). It also has an edge over steady, moderate exercise.
Intense exercise also comes with physical upsides.
It has an 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: Hallelujah! Holy sh*t! Where’s the Tylenol?
Why it works
It packs a lot of beneficial work into 30 minutes or less. More work + less time = more fitness.
It works your entire body, building a strong and resilient engine that’ll help you tackle more in daily life.
It torches calories to offset some of the eggnog, sugar cookies, etc.
It’s designed to be done anywhere—home, garage, hotel, gym, or your in-laws’ driveway. It uses equipment you can find anywhere.
From here, you’ll learn:
Exactly how to do the Hallelujah! Holy sh*t! Where’s the Tylenol? workout.
The full breakdown of reps, rounds, and distances for your fitness level.
Complete videos for each exercise in the workout.
Substitutions and scaled versions of the workout so anyone can do it, no matter your equipment or fitness level.