Some Stuff that Ain’t True and a Jacked Up Complex

You know a couple of things in the strength world have been getting under my skin lately. First, you get a lot of emails from people that are just fluff. I certainly don’t mind anyone doing their marketing to make a living, but I just think we shouldn’t have to live on that alone. If you’re gonna give emails to people, give them some good content as well. That’s something we always try to do. Give you plenty of great stuff to train on or learn from.

Second I’m tired of people saying, “Lifting heavy ain’t good for you.” The only way it ain’t good for you is that if you over do it to the point of excess strain or you just don’t understand what you’re doing and you do the exercise wrong. A lot of claims are made about this lately, but it’s all just bull! It’s natural, right and healthy for you to lift heavy stuff. For every story you hear about someone who hurts themselves lifting something heavy, I can give you a story of someone who is healthier, stronger and fixed their injuries by the use of heavy work. The average person will hurt LESS if they’re stronger and be much more injury resistant. They will maintain their health better as they age, and will have more functional ability.

This is nothing against light training. That is also important if not imperative to do. The greatest results and long term health come from combination training. Heavy training for greater strength and greater structural integrity, lighter training for flexibility, muscular and aerobic endurance. You’re fooling yourself if you leave out either section.

Alright… now that I’m off the soapbox we’ll get a little jacked up complex program for you.


This is a variation of the training programs from Super Strength and Endurance for Martial Arts. It’s also a way to train for combined strength and endurance and extremely powerful health. The complex is a powerful strength and endurance building tool. It is basically the idea of stringing together multiple exercises with the same training implement to train both muscular strength and endurance at the same time and spread the stress out over the whole body. To take it to a whole new level I like to alternate sets of a complex with a heavier exercise. This can be done with single rep training, or strongman or endurance work or simply pure repetition training with a barbell. Here’s a quick one I did yesterday. It’s great as both a strength builder and will drive your conditioning through the roof.

After a basic warm up grab a heavy cable set, something that allows you to do about 10 to 15 reps maximum on the exercises listed. Set up a bar so you can squat. It’s up to you how much weight to put on the bar. When I’m working on conditioning I like to use bodyweight on the bar. That’s what I did with this program. You’ll do three sets of this cable complex, 10 reps for each exercise. Overhead pull down, front chest pull, tricep extension, one arm press, curl, bent row. Right after you finish the complex, hit 20 reps of the barbell squat, repeat for three rounds. Rest as little as possible between rounds. Try to complete the whole thing in less than 10 minutes. It’s fast, it’s fun, it’ll work the crap out of your upper body muscles and make you breath like a steam engine. What more could you want??