201 - Q&A: SFAS Prep Year-Round, Bulking Conditioning, Ruck Progression, Sleep for Shift Workers + More

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What's going on guys? Welcome to another episode of the Terminator Training Show. I'm Kevin Smith. Today is going to be a q and a from this week's Instagram. Ask me anything or I go through and choose some good questions that were asked in my ask me anything story and answer them to the best of my ability. I'm going to try and get to as many as I can. I little bit more rapid fire as has been the theme recently so I can get to your question hopefully if it was a good one or if it wasn't just super redundant from lots of other episodes [00:00:30] and go from there. I am about to start, well, I've already started, but I'm about to finish packing for a little travel. We are going to Phoenix for a few days this weekend to link up with my group business coaching cohort led by Luca Hvar and Andy McCloy.

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Those are my two business coaches and we do in-person meetups a few times a year and they're awesome. So that should be pretty sweet. And then from there, since [00:01:00] we're already on the west coast, basically we are going to fly up to LA and visit my wife's family. They live in the LA area and we're going to stay there for a few days. I'll probably play some golf. It's going to be a working trip. It's not really a vacation, but should still be nice to see some people. Nice to see my sisters-in-law, my mother-in-law, and my nephews, so that should be pretty awesome. Also, my coach, Jay Faria lives in that area and we might get a training session in which would be sick. He's one of the legends in the [00:01:30] strength and conditioning community and getting into in-person beat up training session with him would be pretty damn awesome.

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So we're going to try and make that work. So before we get into the episode, the programs are still on sale. If you're listening to this the day it comes out or the day after it comes out, you are in luck. All TTM programs are 25% off automatic discount, no code necessary. There's links in all that stuff in the description below, wherever you're watching or listening, and that'll be the last sale in February [00:02:00] on all the programs. However, expect to see the run advance program probably sometime next week, the final week of February, not a hundred percent sure. Again, I'll be traveling and there's a lot of logistical things that go on behind the scenes to get programs out, but our goal is to launch it before the end of February. So looking forward to that. My work on that thing is done pretty much other than whatever my wife tells me I need to fix.

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She goes through the fine tooth comb after I'm done and puts everything together, makes everything all pretty, makes sure everyone can understand stuff because sometimes [00:02:30] what I write, what's in my head, some people will read and be like, what the hell is this guy thinking? And that's why I like to recruit my wife because she knows about fitness, but she's definitely not a fitness expert and she's definitely not a running expert. So she'll hit me up and be like, what the hell does this mean? You need to explain it, and so on and so forth. So that's really all we got left and then it's launching it and that program will be on sale when it comes out for the first week or so as we usually do with most TTM programs. But [00:03:00] beyond that, let's hop into today's questions. First question, the only gym around me with a turf sled option is being renovated.

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Any subs for sled push in ruck run lift? Yeah, so this is a general sled push substitution recommendation, not just ruck run lift. If you had have sled pushes in any of your programs or sled poles or whatever it is, honestly there's no great substitution. The great thing about sleds is there's no eccentric or no lengthening portion of the movement. So you get stimulus, [00:03:30] but it's way less damaging and you feel way less sore and it's way less fatiguing than say, doing squats or lunges or something similar. So that being said, it's also because there's no eccentric. Eccentric is the lowering portion or the negative of a lift. It's also a little bit less effective for muscle growth. That being said, it's still a great option and usually when I use sled pushes, although this is not the only implication for them, I use them [00:04:00] for endurance or conditioning more of like a strong man medley type thing or we use 'em for warmups.

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You can obviously use them for speed power, you can use them for strength going really heavy, but in this particular program, in most of my programs, they're more endurance biased. With that being said, you can opt for either a dead mill walk, which essentially means you go to a treadmill yet don't turn it on, you hold onto the sides or maybe you put your butt or lower back against [00:04:30] the front panel that you'd normally be facing. You face away from it of course, and you walk backwards against the treadmill. That's not on the downsides to that. It's not really scalable other than just going longer and longer and longer or harder, but you can't really make it any more weight. It's just you're stuck with whatever the treadmill weight or resistances. So there's that. Or in this case, you could also consider doing a stair climb.

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You can hop on a StairMaster instead of doing the sled [00:05:00] push hop on a StairMaster and then do that for the required duration. I think in the program it goes by distance, but you can kind of predict or estimate how long it'll take you to go a certain distance with a sled and you can do that with the stair climber or the dead mill walk. Definitely not convenient, definitely not ideal and hopefully your gym gets fixed soon and you can get back to doing some actual sled work, but they can be fine for the time being. The good thing about those things, again, like [00:05:30] the dead mill walk is basically the same thing as a sled push or pull. You can also go forward if you want. It's just a little harder because you're going to have to basically find some way to make it so that you are able to hold on, you're able to stabilize yourself and then push forward.

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I would ideally just go backwards. It's just easier that way. But with the stairs you can obviously I would recommend going up the stairs normally, but the similar aspect of those things is there's no eccentric component at all, so [00:06:00] you're getting some good solid stimulus. You're not going to get jacked legs from either of these things. You're not going to really gain a ton of strength, but it's decent for conditioning. It's not as fatiguing as say running a sprint or doing a bunch of lunges or doing a bunch of squats, so it'll get the job done. Another option, you could purchase a sled for your house and you'd probably have to purchase the other aspects of the strongman conditioning session as well, so that might be a little bit impractical, but if you do have a sandbag in the kettlebells or whatever's involved in this session, [00:06:30] you could also buy a sled.

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I have one from Titan and I think I spent like 50, 60 bucks on it and it works really well, but that's just one option. There's tons of different options, but it also just depends on your setup and what you're going for, but those will suffice for now. Next question, minimum effective dose of conditioning when trying to bulk. Great question. A lot of people will just completely throw conditioning out the window when they're bulking and that's not a very good idea for your health. It's also not a very good idea for the success of your bulk. You got to remember that [00:07:00] recovery both between sets and between sessions is an aerobic process. So if you want to be able to recover as well as you can, which by the way if you're bulking, you want to gain muscle, yes, you do want to recover as best you can.

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Having a strong aerobic base is highly advised, so what I would do is probably three to four days a week, 30 to 45 minutes, mostly zone two if not all zone two, just really low fatigue but also enough to get your heart rate up into that 1 21 31 40 range [00:07:30] and keep it there for 30 to 45 minutes. That would be pretty solid. Or if you'd want to do a little bit less frequent, maybe two times a week for 60 to 75 minutes, maybe even a 90 minute session. A lot of people think like, oh, I'm going to do this conditioning and my muscle's going to go away. Like I said, if you're eating enough and you're lifting properly for a bulk, you're not overdoing it. You're giving your muscles the proper stimulus, you're progressing over time, you're not going to lose muscle. That's nowhere near enough conditioning to result in muscle loss.

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[00:08:00] If you're doing like six sessions a week, all 90 minutes, yeah, okay, got it. But a few sessions a week, 30 to 45 minutes or maybe two or three sessions a week, 60 to 75 minutes is only going to enhance your health. It's only going to enhance your insulin sensitivity as well. You're going to be able to eat more food that actually goes where you want it to go and store it. It's less fat when you're well conditioned, you have better insulin sensitivity and you're better at partitioning nutrients to their proper places. So what that means is you're just more likely to gain [00:08:30] muscle from those extra calories than to gain fat. Of course, you're going to gain a little bit of fat in the bulk. That's just how it is, but you want to gain more muscle than fat and it's also going to help you with health.

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It's also going to help you with recovery. It's also going to help you between sessions. Getting back to being prepared to train so strongly recommend it whether you're in a cut in a bulk, honestly, I would do, I would consider doing more cardio in a bulk. If your goal is just to gain muscle, if you don't really care about conditioning but you want to use [00:09:00] the cardio to enhance your bulk, I would consider doing more cardio in a bulk than in a cut. Again, that is assuming that you don't have conditioning goals. If you're in a cut and you also want to improve your conditioning, yes, you should definitely do performance bias conditioning, but a lot of people will kind of mix this up and they go into a cut and they increase their workload, especially their cardio, and that is just not going to last very long.

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As far as your continued progress, it's going to slow your metabolism down, it's going to add more stress. That doesn't mean you can't do any cardio, but it's [00:09:30] more of like an ace up your sleeve for fat loss. For example, when I got really, really lean in October and November of this year, I did almost no cardio. I did a couple times a week, some weeks I was not very consistent with it of what I just said, like 40 minutes at 125 heart rate on an incline treadmill, but some weeks I missed and honestly, that's very, very little cardio as far as calorie burn is concerned, I got absolutely shredded then. I've been in a bulk for the last couple months or so and I've been doing significantly more cardio. [00:10:00] Lastly, type of cardio does matter too. If you don't care about running and you just want to maintain your conditioning, I would do something other than running something like incline walking or stairs or bike or row running is just a little more fatiguing.

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It's going to interfere a little bit more with your overall recovery and it's going to make your legs a little more sore and it's going to beat your lower body joints up a little bit more than those other versions of cardio. So that's what I would strongly consider. Of course, if you care about running, you definitely should run and just know that it's [00:10:30] going to interfere a little bit more because of the eccentric and the impact of running and because you're gaining weight, so it's going to be a little more stressful on your body, but it still can be done. It's just if you don't care about run performance, I would strongly suggest using a different alternative. Next question, multiple years from SFAS, should I just do ruck run lift over and over and over again with new numbers? No, please do not do this.

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I've talked about this before. This is perpetual selection prep. The only time you want to prep for a selection is when you're actually within [00:11:00] striking distance of that selection. Striking distance in most cases is three to four months. So ruck run lift's about 16 weeks long and therefore that's when you should start that prep is when you're about 16 weeks, 17 weeks prior to going to selection. If you run selection prep program over and over and over again, ruck, run, lift s, fa s, other selection prep programs, you are going to run into points of diminishing returns. You're going to plateau a lot and you're also going to beat the hell out of your body [00:11:30] selection. Prep selection itself is not longevity friendly. You go to selection not to enhance your longevity and feel great after and enhance your life down the road. It's going to take a toll on you acutely as well as a little bit long-term just depending on how fit you are depending on your experience with selection.

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It's not like a major, major toll, but it's definitely not something you would go to multiple different times throughout your life. If you want to just be as vigorous and feel as good as possible joints wise, nervous system wise [00:12:00] and so on and so forth, you go once hopefully and make it. Maybe you have to go twice. Maybe you go to a different selection down the road. Yeah, it's a worthwhile trade off if that's standing between you and your goals. If your goal is to be in soft, it is, and likewise, training for selection or prepping for selection is also not very longevity friendly. You're going to do a lot of running, you're going to do a lot of ruck running. You're going to be loaded a lot and you're going to be just kind of pounding your joints and it's rough on the nervous system.

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It's a high stress endeavor. So if you're following [00:12:30] selection prep program over and over and over again, do the math. It's going to beat you the hell up at very best. It's going to beat you up. At worst, it's going to hurt you and set you back and you're going to have to take time off and you're always going to be kind of coming and going from these selection prep programs. The proper way to do it would be to build your general fitness, general physical preparedness from basically now until you're about four months out from selection, and there are multiple different ways to do that. You could use my programs, you could use other programs, [00:13:00] but you want to have a slight bias towards endurance, slight bias towards on foot, endurance, running and rucking, but your goal should be to gain strength. Your goal should be to improve your durability.

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It should be to improve your endurance. It should be to improve your overall athleticism, your speed, your quickness, your agility. It should be to really, really train the full aspects of fitness with, again, a slight bias towards endurance, so any of the Jack Elles, you could run all three of [00:13:30] them. You could run two and five mile. You could run my next upcoming running program in the meantime before you get into Ruck Run Lift or you could hop on T eight 50. A new block just started this week, so now it'd be a good time to try it out and when I say try it out, I mean there's a free week trial so you can hop on and see if you like it and if you don't hop off. If you do stay on, you could literally stay on T eight 50 all the way until you're four months out from selection.

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Then you can start Ruck Run Lift. It's a GPP program. It's a hybrid program, so [00:14:00] that would be my recommended approach. Very, very strongly recommended approach. There are people who do this and they don't usually get the best results and they usually beat themselves up and it's usually at best frustrating, really, really frustrating. I just can't get any better or my knees are always bothering me or my feet are always bothering me or my hips are always jacked up and that's because you're just rock running nonstop, nonstop. You should only be ruck running, which by the way, you should do pre-selection and is in ruck run lift. You should only be doing that though when you're [00:14:30] approaching selection. It's not a good thing to do year round or all the time, even though I have been there, I've done it. I used to ruck run every single Friday for my Friday workouts and I did this for a couple years straight, probably missing a few just depending on travel and what I had going on, but it is not very smart.

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I'm still feeling it today. My lower body joints are healthier than they used to be because I actually take lifting and load management very seriously as well as my nutrition, just low inflammatory [00:15:00] diet, but still they don't feel great and that's not the only reason, but it's definitely part of the reason so strongly recommend not being a perpetual selection prepper. Next question. SFAS in the summer or winter cycle, what would you tell someone who could pick their class date? I would strongly recommend spring or fall, early spring or fall, like your only options really. October, I guess September might be considered fall class, but if you go in October or maybe March [00:15:30] would probably be the two best months to go and I'd give the slight nod to March. So the thing about going when it's hot, so the May class, the September class is hit or miss some years it's really hot here in North Carolina.

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Other years it's not, but the May class is usually going to be really hot. That's the last class of the spring before the summer break. They don't run classes over the summer, by the way. Yeah, it would be more of a winter, spring or fall cycle. There's no summer cycle. There's no classes in June, July or August anymore. There used to be an August class and they got rid of it for obvious reasons. It's just [00:16:00] brutally hot here in the south in August, so it was kind of a safety thing, but the thing about ruck based selections or really any performance based selections is the heat is a massive limiter to your performance. I've done lots of episodes about heat in the past. I've done lots of questions about heat and I've done an entire episode. I'll try and link it in the description so you can kind of see what I mean, but it's going to limit your performance significantly.

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It's also going to make [00:16:30] it a little less safe. More people go down with heat injuries in the summertime or when it's hot. The summertime is basically May to September here in North Carolina and therefore your performance is going to be way, way diminished. Yeah, you're not going to be cold at all, which is the only downside to going in the winter. You're cold when you're standing around or not doing anything, but that cold is kind of like a nice security blanket for a performing better. You're going to run way faster when it's 45 degrees out than you are when it's [00:17:00] 95 degrees out or 85 and a hundred percent humidity. You're going to especially ruck way faster when it's in the thirties and forties than you will in the eighties and nineties, and it's also, like I said, much, much safer. You don't have to worry about as much hydration and you don't have to worry about keeping cool.

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You just go and you're in a nice cool environment and you're just going to perform significantly better. The main reason I'd give the slight nod to March or maybe even April, but March is a little cooler. April starts getting a little [00:17:30] warm. It's really kind of splitting hairs, but the main reason is the vegetation is less dense, so you're going to be able to, during land nav, you're going to be able to see a lot further. You're going to be able to move a lot more freely in the woods. You're not going to be getting hung up on a bunch of stuff Breyers and whatnot like you will in say the early fall class or even March or sorry even May when it starts to become summer and there's more vegetation coming in. So that's a huge advantage as well. A lot of people don't understand that like the woods [00:18:00] in Hoffman where you do the land nav aren't super duper dense everywhere, but there are certain places that are really dense and usually it's around draws like low ground with water and a bunch of briers and a bunch of just stuff to get caught on, and it really limits freedom of movement.

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So I would strongly recommend going when it's cold. Ideally, best case scenario, March April class when you're coming off the winter so there's less vegetation, but also it's still nice and cool. You're [00:18:30] going to have to be cold a couple times a day, but I would much rather say during land nav when it's 95 degrees out, you're just going to be hot all the time during sleep first thing in the morning, especially hot when you're rucking and finding your points during the winter, you're going to be cold when you wake up. You might be a little cold at nighttime, but you've got sleeping bags. You can put layers on the thing about when it's hot, you can't get naked, but even if you could get naked, it's still hot, so there's only so much you can do to mitigate the effects [00:19:00] of the heat, whereas when it's cold out, you can layer up and when you're during downtime, like first thing in the morning, yeah, you're going to be a little cold before you step off for your land.

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A iteration that day in the evening before you go to bed, you're going to be a little cold, but you can just put layers on and kind of suck it up a little bit and it's totally worth the trade off for better performance. Next question. Any tips for sleep health when working overnight? I switched to regular sleep hours on two days off, so unfortunately, even though this is really inconvenient for your health, it would [00:19:30] be a much better idea to try and stick to your same schedule when you're not working. The main reason being the body is already not supposed to be awake at night and asleep during the day. I know this is your job and you have to do it. You got to pay the bills, you got to get what needs to be done done, and I'm assuming you're probably not going to do this forever, but the body's not meant to do that.

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The human body, it's even less ideal to go back and forth between sleeping at night and being awake during the day and the opposite, [00:20:00] it just throws your circadian rhythm for a loop. It throws your hormones for a loop. You're going to have crazy mood swings, you're going to have energy dips, you're going to not feel great, you're not going to recover well. It's going to be difficult to make the right food choices because your hunger hormones are going to be all jacked up. It is really not a good thing to do to yourself, and I know it's inconvenient to have to try and run your errands in the evening time or whatever. I don't know exactly what your hours are. I know it's inconvenient socially because most people sleep at night and are [00:20:30] awake during the day and if you once in a while go to a normal schedule, totally fine for certain events or obligations or things that you want to do, enjoy yourself that occur at a time that you're usually sleeping or whatever, get it.

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But for the most part, you want to stick to your schedule and beyond that because you're already kind of doing yourself a disservice with your current, even if you do stick to that schedule, your health is not going to be optimized. It just can't be. No ones can. [00:21:00] You can bring it closer to being optimized or you can bring it closer to as good as you possibly can get it by dialing in your nutrition, dialing in your stress management, ensuring that you have a solid but not excessive training workload. And those are kind of the other aspects besides sleep that are going to really move the needle with regard to health as well as wellbeing, as well as performance throughout the day, ability to think clearly, ability to perform at your job and so on and so forth. So even [00:21:30] though your sleep is just inherently not going to be perfect, it just can't be when you're sleeping during the day and you're awake at night, you can at least try and mitigate those negative effects by being super dialed in elsewhere and like I said, trying to stick to that same schedule even on your off days.

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Next question. Should I skip the test slash deload weeks? If I had a three week TUI with light PT in phase three of Ruck run lift, I'm four weeks out from SVS. I would strongly recommend not skipping the taper [00:22:00] week. It's a little different than a deload. If this was just a deload, I would say yes, absolutely. Those three weeks can act as like a pseudo deload, but since it's a taper week and it's going into selection, you want to be as fresh as possible during selection and you're not really going to eke out all that many more gains in that last hard week of training versus taking a deload week. So maybe you are going to go into selection at 98% as fit as you could have otherwise been versus a hundred percent, but you're 98% fit and way less fatigued versus a hundred percent [00:22:30] fit, but way more fatigued because you did that hard week of training.

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Every time you give your body a stimulus to adapt, to recover and adapt to a training session, you're also getting fatigue along with it. The main point of the taper week is to allow all that fatigue or most of that fatigue to go down while you keep your fitness way higher. Fatigue goes away a lot faster than fitness, so critical to go into selection fresh because that first week is where you're going to have to do all of your [00:23:00] higher performing things. I'm not saying it's the hardest week, honestly, gate week is pretty easy. You just go and perform in the morning and then basically the rest of the day is downtime or classroom time, but those are the days you really want to put your best numbers up, and those are the days you want to be very low fatigue. If you do that entire training week going in the hard last week of the program or whatever it is towards the end of the program, you are basically going to be smoked from that last week and you're going to be smoked all of gate week and then gate week's just going to compound it.

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By the time you get to land nav, you're going to be completely destroyed. [00:23:30] You might just be smoked and not able to perform well or you might be banged up like your lower body joints might be banged up. So by all means, you can skip the test week if you want, no problem, but strongly recommend at least following the taper week for the most part. Maybe not every single day of it, but I would at least do seven days of dial back going in and just know that yeah, that three weeks probably detracted from your overall otherwise results that you would've gotten, but not in a significant way. You're [00:24:00] still going to go in unless you're just blade running, you're barely able to pass anything, then I would just push your selection date anyway. But if you know that you can meet the standards, like maybe if you do that last week and you had a taper week, hypothetical taper week, if you were to do that last hard training week, you might run a 34 minute five mile.

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And if you don't do that last hard training week, but you still do the taper like I'm recommending maybe you run a 34 25 mile and guess what, those are both still totally fine. Those are [00:24:30] totally hypothetical numbers, but you can apply that to rux, you can apply that to PT assessments and so on and so forth. So strongly recommend taking the taper. Next question, prepping for the Norwegian march and using ruck run lift. Should I use a lighter ruck for training? Yes, that would be a great idea. The rux for Norwegian, I think it's 25 pounds, maybe 35 either way, especially for the long rucks on the weekends, I would do it with whatever load you're going to be using at the Norwegian. You can even go a little lighter honestly, [00:25:00] but it's already lighter compared to the program, so just going with the exact weight, it's totally fine, and you can still keep the rux early in the week, a little heavier if you want.

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You don't have to go way up towards the end of the program. There's some really, really heavy rux. You don't have to go that high up, but for longevity reasons and for specificity reasons, there's going to be less fatiguing and more specific to what you're going for. Absolutely makes sense to keep the rock light. Next question, training biceps and triceps at low weight every day effective [00:25:30] for bigger arms. It could be hypothetically, but it would have to be very carefully programmed. I would strongly recommend not doing it every single day. Main reason being is different arm exercises are they have different effectiveness, but they also have different fatigue costs. So things that overload the stretch position, things like bicep face away curl with cables or an incline bench curl or for triceps like an overhead tricep extension or something similar are going to be [00:26:00] more effective for growth, but also more fatiguing than say a spider curl for biceps or a tricep push down that overloads the contracted or shortened position for triceps.

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So if you're doing them every day, you have to be so careful with intensity and volume, but also what position of the actual muscle group is being trained, whether it's short, mid-range, length and overload. So there's a lot that goes into it. It's highly nuanced and doing it every day for most people, unless you have [00:26:30] a very, very experienced coach programming this for you, in which case he probably wouldn't be having you do it every day, but let's say he did, you could get it done, maybe one set every single day of triceps and biceps, mostly in the short position and so on and so forth. But if this were the only way to grow your arms, that would be one thing, but it is definitely not the only way. What I would do is just add frequency from where you're at right now. If you're doing biceps and triceps twice a week, add a third day.

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If you're doing 'em three times a week, add a fourth day. But I would say [00:27:00] anything more than four, maybe five days a week in some circumstances when really well programmed would be overkill, especially because you have to consider, you're probably also doing some pushing and pulling, and if your biceps and triceps are always kind of fatigued, they're not going to be sore after a little while because you're doing 'em so frequently, but they're going to be fatigued still and your grip's going to be fatigued, your forearms are going to be fatigued because they're all involved in your shoulders and your elbows, oh, by the way, are also prone to getting over stress from doing this. It's [00:27:30] probably going to interfere with your pushing exercises, your pulling exercises, your overall strength in your upper body, and it just wouldn't be the most ideal scenario. So like I said, absolutely consider adding some frequency.

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When you add frequency, don't just add a ton of volume at the same time. You can add a little bit of volume, but I wouldn't go from, say you're hitting five sets of biceps and triceps on Monday, five sets of biceps and triceps on Tuesday. Don't add another five sets of biceps and triceps on Thursday. Maybe cut Monday and Tuesday down to three sets and [00:28:00] then maybe add three sets on that next day. If it comes out to be one more set per muscle group per week, that's fine, but if it's another five, you're basically adding 33% to your current arm volume, which would not be a very good idea, and that's a mistake a lot of people make when they increase frequency. Other things you can do that are pretty damn simple, you don't really have to change much. You can train your arms early in a workout.

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You can also train your arms on their own day, say maybe you're doing upper lower, upper lower. Maybe have another day where you just do a few arm [00:28:30] exercises on the weekend or something like that, or you can train them early in the training session before you get fatigued. I wouldn't do this on a day that you're going to be hitting big push pull exercises, but say it's on a leg day and the next day you have no training, you can hit some arm exercises before you get into your leg workout and go from there. Lots of different ways to skin it, but doing them every single day would not be my number one option. Next question. Considerations for training late in the evening, but still want to get to bed at [00:29:00] a decent hour. So I'm assuming he is having trouble sleeping after his training sessions that occur late in the evening, which is honestly, it's not the best time to train because of this factor.

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Also because a lot more people who train later in the evening tend to be less consistent because things come up throughout the day, but if you're consistent, totally fine, and if this is the only time you can train, that's fine too. You can definitely manage it. What I would do is a try to ramp yourself up less [00:29:30] for these training sessions. So a lot of people, their go-to natural pre-workout strategy is to get some caffeine in them, listen to some pump up music, get really, really ramped up. Going to the gym and doing that once in a while is totally fine. Doing that early in the day once in a while is totally fine. Honestly, I would not do this every single training session. Even if you do train early in the morning, some of the days be a little bit more zen, especially if you're type A and you're just a high stress individual all the time.

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Recovery is really important and you can't recover when you're ramped up, whether [00:30:00] it's throughout the day or you're just getting way too ramped up for your training sessions, and it's really hard to get back into that rest and digest, parasympathetic, chill, zen state, but it's especially important at nighttime. So definitely no pre-workout, absolutely no caffeine. You can do a non-ST stem pre-workout if you want, but definitely no caffeine training in the evening. I would also listen to some chill music or listen to no music at all and do your very best to get very focused and into each [00:30:30] individual set throughout your training session. But between sets, really chill out. Do not fucking scroll on your phone. Do not stay ramped up and super pissed off and really amped up between your sets because you're just going to be way, way, way higher. Sympathetically driven during that workout as well as after that workout.

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It's going to be way harder to get back down into that parasympathetic rest and digest, recover state. So focus, but then zen in between sets [00:31:00] after your training session. This is huge. You want to do some sort of cool down, something like taking a five to 10 minute walk, ideally outside if you possibly can, but you can do this on a treadmill too, or you can sit on a recumbent bike or some sort of really light cardio machine and do some deep diaphragmatic breathing, some box breathing or something similar where you're just calming your nervous system down and getting as quickly as you can back into that parasympathetic state. You don't have to do it while walking. You can literally lie down in your back and put a towel over your head and just relax. [00:31:30] You can, like I said, do some zone one cardio.

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You can do this while stretching really, really light stretches. Not super painful like hard mobility exercises, but super light stretches hanging from a pull-up bar, sitting in a squat, maybe doing some elevated pigeon stretch, maybe doing some couch stretch, but you're really focusing on your breathing. You're not listening to anything, you're not scrolling, you're just chilling and being very mindful and being very, very calm, trying to get yourself as calm as possible. Switching to that state, that rest digest, parasympathetic [00:32:00] state after you train, not only for nighttime training, but all training is absolutely critical for long-term gains in performance. Yes, it's not going to be quite as fun to not be all super ramped up for your training sessions on caffeine and pump up music, however, it's going to be just as effective. Maybe you might not be able to hit quite the same exact numbers every single time you would if you were super jacked up, but long-term it's going to be way more effective.

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You're [00:32:30] going to feel better throughout the day. Just in general, you're going to sleep way better and you're just going to recover better, not just because you're sleeping better, but also because you're getting out of that sympathetic or fight or flight state faster after you train. So I would honestly recommend doing some sort of cool down like that for everyone, but especially if you're training at nighttime, it's basically non-negotiable if you want to be able to get into a good solid sleep. And then after that, you want to make sure you're eating ideally some carbohydrates that digests pretty quickly and you don't want to [00:33:00] have a massive meal if your end of your workout and your bedtime are pretty close together, but you definitely want to get some calories in because that's another thing that helps you get into a parasympathetic or rest and digest state and those few strategies will or should absolutely make a huge difference.

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And also lastly, a lot of people try this once or twice and they're like, no, I didn't feel any different. It's like this is a practice. You have to do this on a regular basis for it to work. Just like all [00:33:30] practices, if you do it at first and you've never done any sort of breathing exercise, you've never done any sort of cool down. You're used to just riding home from the gym, riding the high of the workout, cranking the music still, or you're used to just getting on your phone and scrolling immediately after you train or something like that. Your body is so used to that the first time you do some sort of calming exercise, you're not going to be very good at it. You're not going to be very efficient at it and it's not going to work all that well. It's still doing its job, it's still making a small [00:34:00] difference, but you're not going to really feel this difference until you do it on a regular basis, and that's what I would strongly recommend, whether again, whether you're doing it at nighttime to try and get better sleep or you're doing it on any given day's workout at any given time.

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Next question, what can I substitute for 400 meter repeats in two and five mile if I don't have access to a track? So there is no requirement to do your repeats on a track if you want. The best results from two and five mile repeats are benchmark sessions, so I would [00:34:30] strongly recommend not substituting anything from 'em and still doing them, but you could do them on a road. Ideally a flat stretch of road or at least a stretch of road that is net flat. A little bit of rolling hills is totally fine. You could do them even better would be on a dirt road where the impact's a little lower than it would be on pavement. You can do them on a treadmill and even you could do them if you have enough room somewhere, you could do 'em on grass. Even that works.

(34:57):

That would be way better than substituting something else for them. [00:35:00] So tracks are ideal and they're practical and they're easy to measure your distance and kind of visualize what you need to do. But also there are these things called smart watches that can tell you certain distances and you can either walk it off or run it off, jog it off before your workout starts and find where the 400 is at because by the way, you're going to have to do more than just four hundreds. There's other distances throughout the program too, but you mark it off, maybe put a water bottle down at the finish point, maybe put something at the start point and that's your 400. [00:35:30] Basically you run down, do your rest period, run back, do your rest period, and so on and so forth. Or you can maybe even on your first one, just start your watch and have it go off when it's 0.2, five miles or 400 meters, whatever you put in there, and that's totally fine too.

(35:46):

But I would strongly recommend not skipping the four hundreds or not trying to substitute something different. There's really no substitute. It's a running program. If you didn't care about running, in which case you wouldn't be on this program, but let's say it was a different program and it was 400 meters and you just didn't care about running, then you could do [00:36:00] 500 meter row repeats or you could do bike repeats or something like that. But if you really want to get good at running, which I would assume you do following my running program, then I would strongly recommend doing the running speed work because that's going to make a massive difference in your overall results. Next question. Just got Jack Gazelle. Three thoughts on beach sand runs for long. Zone two runs totally fine, I love it. The thing about beach and sand runs is if you're on the hard pack stuff, generally it's going to be at an angle, so you got to factor that in.

(36:28):

If you're going like an out [00:36:30] and not back, then you're going to be at an uneven angle the entire time, and that can cause some issues. You might not feel it from one run, but basically one leg is going to be a little bit landing, a little bit higher than the other leg on a side slope. If you're going out and back, it kind of evens itself out, but still, that's not a get out of jail free card. It's not always going to be like, oh, you're just giving yourself the opposite stress. So it's going to even itself out, but it's a little better than just the same route every time, just going the same way. Say with your right leg high, [00:37:00] your left leg low because of that slope. If it's a little less of a slope, no worries. I would say most beach sand runs, especially if you're doing the hard pack stuff, are always going to be a little bit of a slope.

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So just factor that in. Maybe don't do every single run on the beach, maybe do some of them on the beach so you're not giving yourself that repetitive side slope stress as far as doing it on the loose end, you can if you want, but that sounds absolutely brutal. If you're training for something that's going to have runs that are timed, so maybe you're [00:37:30] training for buds and you actually have to do timed runs on looser sand, or maybe you're training for SVS and you want to get used to the sand that's out on the Sandhills trails at Camp McCall. Doing that once in a while is fine, but it's just very frustrating to run on loose sand and you're not going to be able to go very fast. Not that it matters as long as you're in zone two, that's great. That's the main goal.

(37:49):

There's no speed adaptation that we're going for on the long run days, but just some things to consider totally fine to do Once in a while, I would not make it a habit and do it every single time, unless of course [00:38:00] you luck out and have a perfectly flat beach that you can run on. Next question, how to progress ruck weight and time if you ruck once a week or every other week. So generally time is going to be more scalable. You'll be able to progress for longer. Weight has a limit to it. You don't really want to go unless some weird situation where you're training for something that involves super heavy rocks and you're doing it once in a while, generally going higher than 55 pounds for a training. Ruck is not really all that fruitful. [00:38:30] It's not beneficial. Its potential cons outweigh its pros.

(38:34):

So depending on where you're starting, you might only have a few weight jumps that you can do. Generally a five pound weight jumps totally fine if you're doing it every week or every other week up until you get to 50 ish. I would kind of hold 45, maybe 45. Once you get up to 45, depending on where you started. Say you started at 30 and you're a month in and you've now gone to 45 because you've added about five pounds per ruck. That's reasonable. It may be a little bit fast, maybe two and a half [00:39:00] pounds per ruck or five pounds every other ruck might be a better option. But let's just say it's been about a month and you get to 45, I would probably hold 45 for a few weeks and just progress time and then maybe you've added five to 10 minutes per ruck at 45 pounds for like three rucks.

(39:16):

Then you can add another two and a half pounds, so you're at 47 and a half or maybe five pounds, so you're at 50. Then progress time for a while, five to 10 minutes per ruck. Then you're at 50. Maybe you want to go up to 55 for whatever reason. Maybe you're training for something and you're [00:39:30] getting up to 55 pounds. Then you can after three, four rucks at 50, go up to 55 and then progress duration again. So generally duration is going to be more frequently increased than weight. I would just do one or the other though. So let's just have a complete example starting out. Say your first ruck is 30 minutes. With 30 pounds, I would go for the next week. I would do 35 minutes with 30 pounds [00:40:00] following week, 35 minutes, 35 pounds following week, 40 minutes, 35 pounds following week, 45 minutes, 35 pounds following week, 45 minutes, 40 pounds following week, 50 minutes, 40 pounds, and so on and so forth.

(40:15):

So you're increasing the load a little bit less often than the actual duration, but depending on what you're training for, I don't know how high of a duration you want to get to for general fitness. Rucking for much longer than 90 minutes in one session is not all [00:40:30] that fruitful. But if you're prepping for selection, of course it is either way. If you want to really get good at rucking, I would strongly recommend following a program. My best ruck programs are for general rucking would be Jack is L 3.0 or T eight 50 for selection prep rucking. If you're going to S-A-S-S-A-S, if you're going to other selections, ruck run lift also works for SAS, but those will actually give you a good insight on how to progress load as well as time as well as speed. That's another factor that you got to consider is if you want to get faster, [00:41:00] you're going to have to progress speed generally.

(41:02):

I like to let that happen on its own, especially for walking only Rucks. But eventually when you get into ruck running, if you're prepping for selection, you'll also want to consider how to progress speed. Next question. Got selected but been injured for months. How to maintain motivation for the queue. Yeah, so it sucks to get injured, but at the same time being down in the dumps and not looking to see what else you can improve in your life is no way to live. So even [00:41:30] if you can't do exactly what you want to do training-wise because you're injured, guess what? You can still train other things unless you have some crazy spinal injury or something like that. If your leg is injured, you can train the other leg. You can train the upper body, you can train your core. You can do certain types of cardio that don't further stress whatever injury you have to that one leg.

(41:49):

You can also improve your character. You can also improve your knowledge base. You can get better at speaking to people. You can read books. You can challenge yourself in other ways besides just your fitness. [00:42:00] So even though injuries suck and they're mentally difficult, the longer you spend feeling sorry for yourself and just sulking in the corner, the worse it's going to be. The worse your mental health is going to be. And also you asked about motivation. The lower your motivation is going to be. On the topic of motivation, you should not have to rely on motivation in order to do what needs to be done. There's a difference between motivation and discipline. Discipline means that you just do stuff whether [00:42:30] you want to do them or not, because it's the right thing to do. In order to be a good Green Beret, in order to even make it through the Q course, honestly, you have to have a lot of discipline.

(42:39):

You have to do things because they need to be done, not because you want to do them or don't want to do them. If you only do things that you want to do, you're going to fail. Honestly, you're going to fail in a life if you only do things that you want to do. For example, I was not very motivated to do this podcast before I started, and guess what? I did it anyway because it had to be done. I'm about to travel. I won't be able to do a podcast while I'm gone. So guess [00:43:00] what? I did it. And that's the case for a lot of the things that I have to do throughout the day. Oftentimes, I feel really pumped and excited to do something, but not every single time, and I still do them the exact same way. It's a little less fun, a little bit less invigorating, but I still do it because it has to be done.

(43:16):

So getting used to doing what needs to be done, regardless of how you feel about it, is going to carry you through life in many, many different areas of it. And most people rely on motivation and take a look at most people see where it gets them. [00:43:30] Honestly, the average person is fat, broke out of shape, poor and going nowhere in life because they rely on motivation to actually do what needs to be done rather than just doing it because they know what's the right thing to do. Think back to your, why are you pursuing this? If you have a really strong why, that is what you can always fall back on to get through times where you're sleep deprived, food deprived, miserable, fatigued, smoked. You are in a high [00:44:00] stress scenario where you're about to get graded on something. Why did I sign up for this?

(44:04):

Why do I want to do this? Whether you're motivated or not, if you reflect back to your why, you'll know that this is the right thing to do. I have to do it even if I don't want to, so I'm going to do it oftentimes as well. The best way to get motivated is through action. So you start doing something and even if you didn't feel like doing it at the beginning, you start to feel more like doing it while you're already started. You're kind of in a flow. You're in the rhythm of it right now. For [00:44:30] example, I am 56 minutes into this episode and I feel a lot more like doing it now than I did when I first started. I kind of had to get through that beginning startup cost, which is tough, and that happens with a lot of different things that you don't want to do.

(44:45):

You start doing it because it's the right thing to do and you're a disciplined person and you find you're 10 minutes in, 15 minutes in, 20 minutes in, and you kind of forget that, oh, I didn't even want to do this at the beginning. This is actually not that bad. A lot of times things are a lot more [00:45:00] miserable the way we see them before we start doing them than they actually are once you get into it. So remembering that is a huge thing too. It's like, yes, this is daunting. This is going to be hard. This might challenge the shit out of me. I really don't want to do this. But then you start doing it and you're like, okay, this is not as bad as I played it out to be in my mind. So that's my advice for the motivation thing. Honestly, there were many, many, many, many, many days, probably more days than not in the Q course where I was not motivated [00:45:30] and I still got through it.

(45:31):

And a lot of people do too because there's this thing called discipline and you just do what needs to be done regardless of your emotions, regardless of what you did yesterday, regardless of how you slept last night, just do it. That is going to be what carries you through life that's going to make you successful in any endeavor you choose. And it's pretty simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. But because it's uncomfortable and it doesn't feel great, and it's not a natural human thing to do things that you [00:46:00] don't feel like doing, but if it has to be done, you do it and you feel better about yourself afterwards and you continue doing this day after day after day, and parts of days like hour after hour after hour, what needs to be done in the next hour for me to get to a little bit closer to where my goal is, you start feeling good about it, you start to stack wins, and those wins result in momentum. And that momentum can cultivate more motivation. So you feel more motivated, even though you remember that you're not always [00:46:30] going to be motivated. Motivation is very fleeting. Sometimes it's there and it's great. Take advantage. Sometimes it's not. When it's not. You rely on discipline and you do what needs to be done. So that is what I'd recommend and I think that's a good one to end it on. Thanks for listening, guys. I'll be back soon with another episode. Until then, Terminator out.