1,000 Reps up your first mountain

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.