Burn the Ships: February 2026

Part II of the 3-month mountain (and life) ready protocol.

Welcome to Part II of a special 3-month Burn the Ships series. Read Part I here.

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 world, 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.

Burn the Ships: January 2026

It may not feel like it, but spring is coming.

Every day is now getting longer. This is the moment when the smartest training happens.

I love this time of year because it sharpens my focus. I use winter to prepare for outdoor adventures in the spring. And without fail, that training puts me in the best shape of the year.

If you asked me the best way to live well, live long, and stay capable, my answer is simple: Train like an outdoor athlete.

You don’t need to climb mountains—but outdoor fitness will help you develop the exact capacities that keep us alive, independent, and able to handle what life throws at us for decades.

Outdoor training demands:

• Enough muscle to lift, carry, climb, and protect your joints—but not so much that you’re slow and fragile.

• A high strength-to-weight ratio, which matters far more in real life than max strength.

• Endurance that can go for days—the ability to keep moving for hours, especially when the going gets tough.

• Durability and resilience, so you don’t fall apart when conditions get uncomfortable or unpredictable.

That combination—strength, endurance, resilience, and the ability to do real things in the real world—is what actually matters in the long run.

A hill I’ll die on: Being able to hike a mountain near your home is far more indicative of how long you’ll live than a lab-based VO2 test.

Research across physiology, psychology, and neuroscience shows that outdoor-style training delivers outsized benefits for the body and brain.

A new Burn the Ships experiment

We’re now on month two of our three-month of Burn the Ships workout plan. Each month builds on the last.

The plan leans into the essentials of outdoor training and lays the groundwork to get you ready for an epic spring and summer. Here’s what to expect.

• January: The Approach (read it here)
  Build a broad base of endurance and resilience. I.e., create an engine that can go for days and that won’t break when the going gets tough.

• February: The Crux
  Add strength and uphill power. I.e., add more horsepower to the engine and load tolerance to the frame.

• March: The Summit Push
  Convert it all to real-world outdoor performance and readiness.

By April, you’ll be mountain-ready and mountain-tough.

And even if you never leave the gym or pavement, you’ll still be more holistically fit, stronger, and more durable.

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 The Crux. You’ll learn why it works and how it will improve your fitness and resilience.

• Finally, I’ll give you the complete The Crux workout, with exact steps, full videos, and scaled versions and exercise swaps to get it done anywhere.

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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 intense exercise and mental health. They found that harder efforts 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: hard exercise doesn’t just beat doing nothing (duh). It often beats doing only moderate exercise.

Intense exercise also comes with physical upsides.

It has an edge over less intense exercise for increasing VO2 max—one of the strongest predictors we have for longevity and disease resistance. A rule of thumb: the higher your VO2 max, the farther you are from death, disease, and decay.

In sum: All exercise helps. But going hard—sometimes—matters.

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: The Crux

Why it works

• It builds sustained power.

  • Most people can hike slowly all day, or lift something heavy once or twice. Very few people can keep pushing uphill for hours without their legs turning to jelly. This workout trains your body to be strong even when you’re tired. That’s mountain fitness.

• It builds more strength than you need.

  • If your legs are twice as strong as a hill demands, every step costs less energy. Your heart rate stays lower. Your breathing stays calmer. Your endurance magically improves. This workout gets you stronger than necessary so the real world feels easier.

• It teaches you to breathe well under load.

  • Carrying gear outdoors changes everything. A pack doesn’t just stress your legs—it compresses your lungs and taxes your core. This workout trains you to brace your core, breathe, and move efficiently at the same time. That’s a rare skill. And it’s exactly what you need when you’re climbing with food, water, and gear strapped to your body.

• It makes you more durable.

  • This isn’t fragile, look-good-in-the-mirror “gym strength.” It’s get-shit-done-and-don’t-get-hurt strength. The exercises make your entire body more durable and stable on uneven and unpredictable ground.

• P.S. The weather sucks right now, and not all of you have a garage gym or gym membership. So you can do this workout with minimal equipment inside your home—if you have something that weighs something, you can do it. If you need any swaps, we have you covered in the Questions and Substitutions section. That kills excuses.

Equipment needed

• Something sturdy to step onto. E.g., A Yeti cooler, a sturdy chair, a rock, a box, etc.

• A backpack with weight in it.

• Something heavy you can hold (e.g., Dumbbells, sandbag, kettlebell, etc.)

Time commitment

• This workout should take you about 35-45 minutes.

• I’ve also included ways to shorten the workout in the Questions and Substitutions section.

What I’m listening to as I do this workout

I don’t mean to sound like a crazy prepper, but one thing I love about training for the outdoors is that you’re also training to be useful if the world falls apart and you have to head for the hills and live out an apolcalyptic, The Last of Us scenario.

Which is why I’ll be listening to Sturgill Simpson’s SOUND & FURY album. It’s dystopian. The key lyric from track four, A Good Look:

I write my poems in the dirt with an oily rag
I have to wear a gas mask just so I don’t gag
I got a SOCOM Scout and twenty extra mags
And a couple severed heads in my bug-out bag

Perfection.

How to do it

Start with the Two Percent warmup.

From here, you’ll learn:

• Exactly how to do The Crux workout.

• The full breakdown of reps, rounds, and times 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.