1,000 Reps Up Your First Mountain

Appeared August 1, 2006

I hope today finds you all deeply pursuing the blessings available to you from God, our Father.

Most of the conditioning that I and many of the hardcore athletes now do has a very quantitative nature. In fact I think that’s what attracted me to that type of conditioning originally. There’s just something more substantial about saying, “I’m going to do “x” number of reps in “y” amount of time.” Than saying, “I’m going for a run, or I’m going to ride the bike.”

Nothing wrong with running or biking except for the fact that I believe that all hard conditioning should have some type of interval built in. It’s the natural state of the body. The deeper I got into the alternative conditioning methods that I now pursue the more perspective I gained about them. Here are some of the things I found out.

Using muscular and aerobic conditioning together is the way to add endurance to your strength without taking away from your top end. Fast pacing and moderate rep sets alternating exercises is superior to one long super high rep movement. Single movement super high rep workouts are fine, they’re great base builders, but shouldn’t be the absolute cornerstone of your conditioning. All the alternative implements give similar results as long as you give the right effort. Alternating implements is a great way to add variety to your training, up your conditioning and stop over use injuries.

Reps of one type of exercise do not have a straight equal in another type of exercise. (100 bodyweight squats may equal 50 kettlebell snatches in the amount of power output and conditioning they may require). Different people will have different exercises that they are particularly suited for. Generally speaking however the mark of solid started conditioning is a 500 rep workout. The next gateway and the beginning of super endurance is 1,000 reps.

Here’s a sample 1,000-rep workout that I did the other day, which you can have a little twisted fun with:

20 reps band twists
20 push ups
20 bent over rows
20 bodyweight squats

Done with no rest between sets, repeating five times.

20 step ups
20 half sit ups
20 kettlebell swings
20 dumbbell arm movements

Done with no rest between sets, repeating five times.

50 band pull aways
50 leg lifts
50 kettlebell high pulls
50 double dumbbell presses

There you have it. 1,000 reps. Working every part of the body at a fast pace building both cardiovascular and muscular endurance. If you really want to spice it up, throw in a strength exercise at the beginning, middle or end. I bent some nails at the end of this workout even though it would have normally been quite easy, they were significantly more challenging because of the total level of fatigue.

If you want to step up to a level of endurance that carries over to everything that you do that really has a long term effect on your health and energy and makes your strength work easier, at some point you have got to explore the upper echelon of what’s possible with your endurance. You’ve got to build up to it and then go to places you didn’t think were possible. Just add a few reps at a time. Keep going, getting one more rep, one more set of 10, whatever you have to get to get there.

Then you can sit on top of the mountain and know you’ve been somewhere and you can see even higher peaks to climb


PART II - Appeared August 2, 2006

Another 1,000 Reps

Yesterday we talked about a 1,000 rep workout. A starting place for super endurance. Got a huge response in the email about this so I thought I’d talk about one of the emails I got and then throw out another 1,000 rep challenge.

There are all kinds of ways to do this workout. I told you yesterday that I believed a mixed workout involving a fast pace alternated sets of many different exercises is probably the best way to go. However you can take one exercise and one implement and do 1,000 reps with that or you can take multiple other approaches such as that of Steve Schmidt.

Lee Gesbeck wrote to me yesterday about one of Steve’s record setting backlift challenges. Steve is the modern equivalent of Warren Lincoln Travis and has beaten most if not all of his heavy lifting challenges. Steve backlifted 1,000 pounds for 1,000 reps in something like 7.15 minutes. Beating Travis’ time of 9 minutes. This gentlemen, is a monumental feat and a monumental challenge to put yourself through.

It will create not only incredible endurance, but muscles, joints, tendons and ligaments of steel. Steve uses a special set up that allows for the right kind of repetition backlifting for speed. But I’ll probably take this challenge on anyway even though I use a different set up.

What’s the saying? “Do the thing and you’ll have the power.” Well if you want that kind of back breaking power then you’ve got to do that kind of back breaking work. Alternately you could take five different partial lifts and work them each for 200 reps a piece or two lifts and work them for 500 reps a piece. Partial bench, partial overhead press, partial squat, partial deadlift, partial row. This is just a for-instance.

The big point… work hard, challenge yourself to go beyond what you think is humanly possible.