Training without weights: a special forces training for a strong and compact physique

I’d like to share a cool conditioning exercise that I came up with a few months ago to get stronger and more fit in a short amount of time. It incorporates the concept of “Ladders” found in Pavel Tstatsouline’s book “Power to the People”. In this book, Pavel shares the training secrets of the Soviet commandos and the athletes he used to train with that allowed the Russians to dominate other countries in the Olympic Games. . This is very popular with the Marines and SEALS, and we use this type of training to get really high levels of raw strength and force endurance while maintaining our long-distance runs.

What are the stairs?

Basically, you’ll pick an exercise and start at the “bottom” of the ladder doing 1-5 reps. You will rest the same number of seconds as repetitions per set. So if I start doing 2 pushups, I would rest 2 seconds, do 4 pushups, rest 4 seconds, etc. until you reach a specific number. You want to try to do as many reps as possible without failing. This is different from a pyramid set in that you stop at the top of the stairs in this workout, but in a pyramid set you will go up AND down. This is great for building muscle, but not for strength or muscle definition. Ladders are an excellent tool that can be applied to almost any training plan. I absolutely love them.

My “Special Forces” exercise finisher

You will need access to a pull up bar. You will do 3 “ladder super sets” of push-ups and pull-ups. This means you’ll complete a ladder of push-ups and then immediately transition to pull-ups without a break. After this “super set” (performing 2 exercises in a row), you will rest for 30 to 60 seconds and then repeat at least 2 more times. Focus on getting perfect reps at a medium pace and stop before you feel like you can’t do any more. If I’m preparing the guys for the Marines or SEALS, we’ll do the ladder push-ups from 2 reps to 14 reps going up 2 reps at a time, and we’ll do pull-ups from 1 rep to 7 reps going up 1 rep at a time, and repeat this cycle 4 times. We do this as a poor finisher of a long ruck march or run pretty regularly and many guys can max out at least 100 push ups and 20 pull ups for our PT tests.

Why this type of training builds a hard and “compact” physique

I love this workout because it combines some key training principles into one session. The ladder principle builds strength, stamina, and conditioning, as you build up a high volume of repetitions in a short amount of time, but your muscles don’t get “pumped” due to rest periods. By layering the push with pull exercises, I took advantage of opposing muscle groups helping each other. Basically, alternating pushing with pulling gives each muscle group a break and at the same time tells the central nervous system to start connecting the neurons that fire individual muscle fibers. Essentially, doing pull-ups will start helping you do pull-ups and vice versa. Very cool! The more you compress the training time frame, the more fat burning hormones you will release to make it a conditioning workout as well.

How I used this training method to duplicate my regular pull-ups and master one-armed pull-ups

After doing this workout for the past 6 months, I increased my chin-up max from 20 to 40 reps and push-ups from 100 to 135 in 2 minutes. I also think it helped me achieve one-armed pull-ups, which I just mastered a week ago (and which I’ll be doing a post about soon!). Doing this type of high-volume, low-rep training with perfect form has similar effects to a weight-lifting cycle. In fact, a ladder workout is basically a full cycle of compressed powerlifting in just a few minutes. What’s really great is that I never feel sore from doing exhaust sets again, but my strength and conditioning level just keeps improving.