Housekeeping
Full access to our Burn the Ships workouts is for Members of Two Percent.
Burn the Ships with us. Become a Member to get full access to Two Percent and accessible workouts you can do anywhere in the time you have.
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The post
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.
Fall is upon us. Leaves are changing. Clouds are hanging around. It’s finally not so damn hot. It’s the best time of year to get outside and cover some ground.
Humans are uniquely good at covering ground. We’re not that strong of creatures. In the past, absolute strength was likely reserved for combat. Our strength, historically, was most often used to carry objects over long distances, or move our bodies through space, like climbing a tree to gather honey or getting up off the ground, etc.
This workout works these fundamental skills—it teaches us to move our bodies and objects rapidly through space. It’ll get you outdoors and give you an ideal strength and movement stimulus, helping you to become a high-functioning, SUPERMEDIUM human.
The case for one tough weekly workout
Section summary: Doing one challenging workout a week is ideal for health and fitness.
I started doing one tough workout every Friday after reporting inside Gym Jones roughly 14 years ago.
There’s something purifying about doing a challenging workout on Friday. It wipes the workweek off the books and makes me feel like I’m riding high into the weekend.
There’s also some 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, 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: High Speed, Low Drag
Why the name
“High speed, low drag” is a phrase from the aviation world. It explains how engineers design aircraft to minimize drag, allowing the plane to fly faster and travel farther. American soldiers then adopted the phrase in the Vietnam War to indicate carrying only equipment vital to the mission.
It’s a decent framework for our fitness. We want to be able to cover ground swiftly and have enough strength to get the job done, but not so much excess muscle that we get weighed down. I.e., for most tasks in life and great general fitness, want to be SUPERMEDIUM.
This workout cuts the excess so we can move fast and hit hard. It targets the skills humans are good at—it teaches us to move our bodies and things rapidly through space.
Equipment needed
Something heavy-ish that you can carry. A sandbag is best (that’s what I’ve listed in the workout). But you can also use a heavy medicine ball, a ruck, a bag of sand from Home Depot, dumbbells, etc. Ideally, this weight is anywhere from ¼ to ½ of your body weight.
Time commitment
This should take you between 30 and 60 minutes if you do it as prescribed.
You can always cut the workout in half if you’re crunched for time.
Song I’m listening to while doing this workout
This workout starts slow, escalates, and remains gritty for a long time. As such, I’m listening to Neil Young’s Cowgirl In the Sand. Final answer.
If this workout were an animal, it would be a:
Falcon because those birds attack swiftly, viciously, and are incredibly strong for their weight.
How to do it
(Note that we have substitutions if you have no gear, are pressed for time, want to do this in a gym, or have trouble with any of the exercises.)
Here’s the standard version of High Speed, Low Drag. Go outside and do the following:
1. Start with a warmup. I like the Two Percent Warmup. It’s quick and effective.
2. Now set a timer and do the following: