Burn the Ships: July Edition
One weight, 21 minutes.
Housekeeping
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Podcast
The post
It’s the first Friday of the month. Which means it’s time to Burn the Ships.
I’m spending this month in the Northeast. Leah, the dogs, and I are posted up at an Airbnb—a 150-year-old building that abuts the Delaware River.
It’s great, but I don’t have access to my garage gym.
My solution: I ordered a single kettlebell, which I’ll use for all of my weight training this month.
You might think having just one weight is limiting. But when resources are constrained, people tend to become more creative and discover clever ways to solve problems. I wrote about this phenomenon in Scarcity Brain, and researchers at the University of Illinois demonstrated it in six experiments.
Apply the idea to fitness, and you might uncover new, creative ways to exercise that break you out of a rut and fill your gaps.
This month’s Burn the Ships is the workout I’ll do every Friday using a single kettlebell. It moves fast and hits hard.
It works your entire body without any fluff.
It burns fat while improving strength in some of the most important movements a human can do.
It transfers over to helping you move and perform better in all other activities—from rucking to golf to pickleball—and life in general.
If you’re a regular participant in Burn the Ships and know why we do this workout, scroll down to “This Month’s Workout” to get the details.
If you’re new (or want a refresher), start here to understand the origins of Burn the Ships and the case for doing one tough workout a week.
The Case for One Tough Weekly Workout
I started doing one tough workout every Friday after my time reporting inside Gym Jones roughly 12 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 and disease.
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 (more 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.
Burn the Ships: How it works
On the first Friday of every month, we publish a new 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, and—in turn—your life.
We’ve provided scaled versions and exercise swaps, so anyone and everyone can do them.
In other words, we’re pushing edges and improving safely. It’s easy to be hard but hard to be smart.
This month's workout: Liberty Bell
Why the name?
About a month ago, I wrote about a fascinating study showing the power of a 12-minute workout using a single kettlebell.
This month, we’re taking some of the ideas and blowing them out into a Burn the Ships workout.
Of note:
I’ve been revisiting the work of Pavel Tsatsouline. Pavel introduced kettlebell training to the West and runs StrongFirst.
He’s ruthlessly efficient with his thinking and training—he includes what works and nixes what doesn’t.
This workout is inspired by what I’ve learned from him, sprinkled with some Two Percent flavor—Chef’s kiss.
Where to do this workout
Anywhere.
I’ll be doing it in the back parking lot of our Airbnb.
Equipment needed
One kettlebell.
The kettlebell should be heavy enough to provide resistance to make the lower body exercises challenging, but not so heavy that you can’t hold it into your chest.
Time commitment
Anywhere from 17 to 35 minutes for the workout alone.
Add ~15 minutes to that for the cool down.
What I’m listening to while doing this workout
I’m in New Jersey, a state that’s produced some of our greatest musicians: Count Basie, Sinatra, Springsteen, Patti Smith, Whitney Houston, George Clinton, Glenn Danzig, etc.
Lauryn Hill, born in East Orange, is one of those Jersey musicians.
Her 1998 album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, is a masterpiece. Apple Music named it the best album of all time.
So, the final answer: I’m listening to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
How to do it
Here’s the standard version of Liberty Bell.
Grab a kettlebell and do the following.
Note: The video below shows you how to do the warmup and workout.