Lobo: The Next PUSH Training Cycle

Every time we start a new training cycle, I usually have a pretty obvious answer when someone asks what we are testing.

Over the last few cycles we have tested strict pull-ups, deadlifts, squats, rowing, mixed conditioning pieces and enough other things that some of your SugarWOD histories probably look like a strange science experiment at this point.

This cycle is going to be a little different.

There will still be things we can measure. I like data. I like being able to look back eight weeks later and see if what we thought would happen actually happened. But I also don't think we need to come up with five tests just so we can prove that eight weeks of training worked.

Sometimes we can just train to get better at things.

Crazy concept.

The basic structure of the week will look like this:

monday: hinge strength tuesday: skill + engine wednesday: upper-body strength thursday: HYROX friday: squat strength

Saturday will continue to have Lifting Club followed by a partner workout, and Sunday will lean toward longer HYROX/aerobic work with more of a community feel.

Nothing revolutionary there.

Squat. Hinge. Push. Pull. Run. Practice skills. Lift weights. Build an engine.

Fitness doesn't always need to be more complicated than that. What matters is how we organize those things, how often we expose you to them and whether there is actually a plan for getting better at them.

TRAIN MORE THAN YOU TEST

One of my favorite things we have done in recent cycles has been the focused progression work.

We did it with strict pull-ups. More recently, we did it with ring dips.

Instead of occasionally putting strict pull-ups into a workout and hoping everyone magically became better at them, we practiced them consistently. We gave people rep ranges based on their current ability, controlled the volume, progressed those numbers over several weeks and then retested.

Turns out practicing something makes you better at it.

We are going to take some of that same idea into this cycle, specifically with double-unders and handstand work.

There is a difference between doing 50 double-unders because they're written on the whiteboard and actually practicing double-unders. The same goes for being upside down.

If every exposure you have to a skill happens while you're tired, staring at the clock and wondering why your jump rope suddenly became 11 feet long, that probably isn't the best environment to actually learn.

Skill work gives us time to slow things down. Understand positions. Work through progressions. Make mistakes without the clock punishing you for it. Accumulate good reps and actually learn something.

Then we can go get tired.

That's why Tuesday is skill + engine. I want the first part to require some thought and patience. The second part should require significantly less thought and significantly more lungs.

Over the course of the cycle, the goal isn't necessarily that everyone suddenly becomes a gymnast. It's consistent exposure.

Maybe you get your first double-under. Maybe you go from 10 to 30. Maybe you've had double-unders forever and become more efficient at doing large sets while staying relaxed. Handstand work can be the same. For one person, getting upside down against the wall is progress. Someone else might be working on strict handstand push-ups or walking.

Different starting points. Same idea.

Practice with some intention and you're probably going to get better.

HEAVY. LIGHTER. HEAVY. LIGHTER.

Monday is probably the part of this cycle I'm most interested to see play out.

We are going to spend a good amount of time deadlifting, but instead of following something like a traditional 5x5, we're going to play with wave sets.

One version will look like:

6-1-6-1-6-1

Six reps at a moderate percentage. Add weight and hit a heavy single. Take weight back off and return to six. Then heavy again.

There are a few reasons I like this.

The sets of six give us enough volume to actually drive strength development. The singles allow us to regularly touch heavier weights without needing to turn every Monday into a max-out day.

And I think touching heavy weights matters.

There is a skill to lifting something at 85–90% that you don't completely get from doing sets at 65%. Your setup matters more. Your brace matters more. Small positional mistakes become bigger positional mistakes. You also just need to become comfortable with the feeling of something being fucking heavy.

That's a skill too.

The other interesting part is what happens when you come back down.

There is a neurological component to performing a heavy muscular contraction and then returning to a lighter load. You may hear this described as post-activation potentiation or, more accurately in a lot of training situations, post-activation performance enhancement.

That sounds significantly cooler and more complicated than it needs to.

Basically, after handling something heavy, your nervous system and muscles can temporarily be in a state where you're better prepared to produce force afterward. That doesn't mean your next set of six magically becomes light. Seventy percent is still seventy percent. Unfortunately, I have not figured out how to trick physics yet.

But there is something useful about moving back and forth between volume and intensity instead of keeping them completely separate.

We get reps. We get heavier exposure. We get practice producing force at different percentages. And hopefully, over the course of the cycle, both sides of that wave start moving up.

There is one important part to this.

The singles are not maxes.

If you spend nine seconds pulling your single while your soul briefly leaves your body, we have misunderstood the assignment.

Heavy. Clean. Confident.

Then take some weight off and go back to work.

BUILDING A BETTER WEEK

The bigger thought behind this cycle isn't really any one workout. It's the week itself.

Monday gives us dedicated hinge strength. Tuesday lets us practice skills and build the engine. Wednesday gives upper-body strength its own space. Thursday stays HYROX. Friday we squat.

I wanted upper-body strength to have a real place in the week because doing a lot of upper-body movements isn't necessarily the same thing as getting stronger.

Push-ups buried inside a metcon are not the same stimulus as intentionally developing pressing strength. Pull-ups mixed with running and wall balls aren't the same as deliberately getting stronger at pulling.

So Wednesday gives us room for pressing, pulling, rows, dips, bench, strict work, and whatever else fits the progression.

Then there is Thursday.

HYROX isn't moving.

We have built that into our schedule, people specifically come to PUSH for it, and it fits this cycle well anyway. The movements are generally simple, but there are a lot of them.

Run. Row. Ski. Bike. Push something. Fall down, get up. Lunge. Throw a ball at a wall an unreasonable number of times.

You don't need a gymnastics degree. You need an engine and the ability to continue producing work after your body has started filing complaints with management.

Then Friday we squat.

I could write six paragraphs about why maintaining lower-body strength matters for performance, muscle mass, bone density, aging, and general quality of life.

All true.

But also...being strong is useful. Squatting helps.

Sometimes that's enough.

A member brought up an idea while I was putting the finishing touches on this cycle that I thought was really good.

Why not use more of a rolling training schedule? Instead of deadlift always being Monday and squat always being Friday, the days could shift from week to week. That way someone who can never make it on Mondays doesn't go an entire cycle without getting the primary hinge work.

I really like the thought behind it.

The problem was that Lobo was already mostly written, and the more I tried to see how that idea could fit, the more we started creating other problems to solve that problem.

Heavy squatting and deadlifting can't just land next to each other because the calendar says that's where they go. Thursday also has to remain HYROX, and while HYROX is generally simple movement, good luck creating a legitimate HYROX workout that somehow doesn't involve your legs.

Running, rowing, biking, sleds, wall balls, lunges. Your legs are going to find out.

Then we have weekends, which are great training days for some members and completely unrealistic for others.

Eventually it felt like we would be playing Tetris with a cycle that was already built instead of making the programming better.

But I think the member's reasoning was right.

If someone trains consistently three or four days a week, but their schedule means those are generally the same days, I don't love the idea that they could potentially miss an entire strength focus just because we always deadlift on Monday.

So rather than force that idea into Lobo, I want to see if I can build our next cycle around it from the beginning. There are still some problems to solve, especially with HYROX having a permanent home on Thursday, but that's part of the fun of programming.

For this cycle, the structure stays simple.

And hopefully that simplicity lets us do a better job progressing the things inside of it.

TRAINING FOR THE LONG GAME

So what are we actually trying to accomplish over these next eight weeks?

I keep coming back to one word: capacity.

Not capacity in the sense of just doing more shit faster.

A bigger physical toolbox.

Can you produce more force?

Can you sustain work longer?

Can you move your own body better?

Can you learn a new skill?

Can you maintain good positions when you're tired?

Can you recover and do it again?

Some of those things are very easy to measure. Others aren't.

And I'm okay with that.

We'll have benchmarks. We'll track numbers. I still want objective information that tells us whether the program is moving people in the direction we thought it would.

But I don't want to get so obsessed with testing fitness that we forget to spend most of our time actually building it.

We've watched people improve their strict pull-ups and ring dips because we stopped hoping they would get better and gave them consistent opportunities to practice.

We're taking that same general idea and applying it more broadly this time.

Get stronger.

Practice things you're not good at.

Build an engine.

Do enough of all of it, consistently enough, that your body has no choice but to adapt.

Then we'll see where we end up.

Training for the long game.

Stay Dope.