Burn the Ships November 2025
A fat and calorie-burning workout.
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, then 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, 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.
We’re pushing edges and improving safely. It’s easy to be hard but hard to be smart.
On Monday, we covered new findings on exercise and calorie burn. It got me thinking about a specific Burn the Ships workout we ran years ago. It’s our greatest calorie-and-fat burner of all time.
With Thanksgiving upon us, we all probably need to burn more calories this month.
This month’s Burn the Ships workout: Carry What You Kill.
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 Carry What You Kill—and why it’s a favorite of elite strength coaches and our greatest fat-burner ever.
Finally, I’ll give you the complete Carry What You Kill workout, with exact steps, full videos, and scaled versions and exercise swaps to get it done.
Thanks to our partners:
Maui Nui harvests the healthiest protein on planet earth: wild (and invasive) axis deer on Maui. The nutritional value of axis deer is incredible. My go-to: The 90/10 stick. Head to mauinuivenison.com/lp/EASTER to secure access.
Jaspr air purifiers. Air quality is a massively overlooked health metric. I consider Jaspr my #1 home health tool. Most health-promoting things require effort—but Jaspr is an exception. Just plug it in and remember to breathe. Get a discount through this link.
I wear GOREWEAR gear on long fall hikes. Specifically, the CONCURVE WINDSTOPPER insulated jacket, which cuts the wind and cold. Check it out. EASTER gets you 30% off your first GOREWEAR purchase. It’s pure Gear Not Stuff.
The case for one tough weekly workout
Section summary: Doing one challenging workout a 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 analyzed1 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.”
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 an edge2 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: Carry What You Kill
Why the name?
In 2023, 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 are two of those four movements.
Our species is unique in our ability to cover great distances on foot and carry weight. We’d run down animals in the heat, 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 Day, the Head Football Strength & Conditioning Coach at the University of South Carolina, 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? So 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 epic endurance and functional strength all while burning fat and calories.
From here, you’ll learn:
Exactly how to do the Carry What You Kill 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.