Carry or die
Burn the Ships, June 2025
Housekeeping
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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.
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.
In other words, we’re pushing edges and improving safely. It’s easy to be hard but hard to be smart.
Leah and I just moved homes.1
Hence, my life this week consisted of carrying heavy items from point A to B: boxes, furniture, televisions, etc, etc, etc.
Carrying is the most critical exercise a human can do. We’re uniquely evolved to carry weight. It’s an exercise that shaped us into who we are.
But we’ve engineered carrying out of our life. We not only carry less, we also miss out on all the possible ways we can carry.
This has had massive ramifications for our metabolic health, bone density, muscle maintenance, toughness, performance, injury rates, and so much more.
The case for one tough weekly workout
Section summary: Doing one tough workout a week seems to be the sweet spot for health and fitness.
I started doing one tough workout every Friday after reporting inside Gym Jones roughly 14 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, 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 or Die
Why the name
Carrying is a missing link in our fitness.
It can help prevent many of the modern issues we now face, from metabolic disease to frailty.
Plus, it’s the most “functional” movement you can do. It makes you physically useful.
This workout hits all the critical ways humans can carry—mixing up our carries gives us the most benefits.
Carry when you’re young to live better. Carry when you’re old to live longer. Carry when you hit a midlife crisis to live saner.
Where can I do this workout?
I suggest you do it outside.
Time commitment
This should take you between 35 and 60 minutes.
Equipment needed
Something you can carry. E.g., A sandbag, dumbbell, kettlebell, etc.
The workout
Here’s Carry or Die
The warmup
Start with a warmup. Take five to ten minutes to stretch and mobilize your joints. The Two Percent warmup is good for this.
The workout
Do the exercises in the order shown: