Housekeeping
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Audio/Podcast version
The post
It’s the first Friday of the month. Which means it’s time to Burn the Ships.
Two Percent is holding its second Don’t Die retreat in Las Vegas on November 2nd and 3rd.
Don’t Die is an epic weekend of learning and practicing the fine art of—you guessed it—not dying. The goal is to expand your comfort zone by pulling from our 40 years of experience in dangerous environments and studying and practicing the foundations of self-reliance, health and wellness, and psychological resilience.
This month’s Burn the Ships workout is inspired by some of the fitness information we cover and practice at the Don’t Die retreat.
It’s a hard-and-fast practicum of exercising in a way that makes us perform better and remain resilient no matter our goal.
It builds the physical skills needed to survive an emergency at home or abroad.
It’ll help you perform on trips deep into the wilderness.
It’ll improve your day-to-day life by boosting your healthspan.
And it’s not what you might expect. Typical fitness programs get this type of fitness totally wrong (more on that below).
Our Burn the Ships workout follows a conversation with Tim Mak, a war journalist in the Ukraine who told me a bit about his fitness plan.
If you’re a regular participant in Burn the Ships and know why we do this workout, scroll down to “This Month’s Workout” to get the details.
If you’re new (or want a refresher), start here to understand the origins of Burn the Ships and the case for doing one tough workout a week.
The case for one tough weekly workout
I started doing one tough workout every Friday after my time reporting inside Gym Jones roughly 12 years ago. I’ve maintained the practice.
There’s magic in pushing it once a week.
First, there are the brain benefits. The practice makes me less insane.
Scientists at King’s College in London analyzed 53 studies on how intense exercise impacts mental health.
They found that it led to “improvements in mental wellbeing, depression severity, and perceived stress compared to non-active controls, and small improvements in mental wellbeing compared to active controls.”
In other words, intense exercise has a mental edge compared not only to not exercising (duh), but also to regular-paced exercise.
Intense exercise also—obviously!—comes with physical upsides.
It has a slight edge over less intense exercise for increasing VO2 max, which is associated with all sorts of good physical outcomes. A rule of thumb: the higher your VO2 max, the farther you are from death and disease.
TL;DR: All exercise helps. But it makes sense to go hard sometimes.
What’s “sometimes?”
The smartest trainers I regularly speak with suggest that one tough workout a week is the sweet spot for health and performance (more info on that here).
More than that, and we tend to get burned out and beat down. Less than that, and we miss out on some health and performance upsides.
Enter Burn the Ships.
Burn the Ships: How it works
On the first Friday of every month, we publish a new workout for Members only.
Members of the Two Percent community do the workout every weekend—a bunch of us satellites, all sweating and improving together as one extensive network.
Burn the Ships workouts are safe and effective. They improve your strength, cardio, movement quality, and—in turn—your life.
We’ve provided scaled versions and exercise swaps, so anyone and everyone can do them.
In other words, we’re pushing edges and improving safely. It’s easy to be hard but hard to be smart.
This month's workout: Don’t Die
Why the name?
The workout improves your ability in the three core skills you need to not die—the skills you’d need in a kinetic environment or in an emergency at home.
Those skills are covering ground, carrying weight, and avoiding injury.
Those skills aren’t often discussed in fitness circles. When we think of the physical skills someone needs in a conflict zone or to stay safe at home, we often picture big muscles. E.g. big, burly Navy SEAL types.
But when things go wrong, big muscles and excess power can become a liability.
We go deeper into the science and practice of Don’t Die fitness at the event and explain how you’d build a fitness approach that leans on these ideas.
Where to do this workout
A garage gym or traditional gym.
Go outside if you can access a pullup bar.
Equipment needed
A weight vest (preferred) or ruck.
A sandbag or sand medicine ball (preferred), or anything you can carry that weighs something … e.g, a weight plate, dumbbell, etc.
A jump rope.
Time commitment
~1 hour
What I’m listening to while doing this workout
Your driver is most important person in any trip into a dangerous place. He’s your wheels, your escape plan, and the one you have to be able to trust.
When I was in the Middle East reporting on the Captagon drug trade, I had a particular driver.
This particular driver was the best I’d ever had—an expert in the art of vehicular evasion, no matter the terrain.
He could thread his Land Cruiser through a spot that would fit a Q-Tip while driving at top speed. He could run the SUV up and down steep sand dunes that would lead any other driver to tip the vehicle and kill all its passengers. He could run the vehicle’s tank to empty and still pull 100 more miles out of it.
And this particular driver liked to blast Omar Souleyman, the Syrian artist, in the Land Cruiser. As such, we must listen to this Oman Souleyman playlist.
How to do it
Here’s the standard version of Don’t Die.
Complete the warmup.
Then:
Put on a weight vest (preferred) or light ruck. Your weight vest and ruck shouldn’t be too heavy. Aim for 10 to 15-ish pounds if you weigh less than 150 pounds and 15 to 20-ish pounds if you weigh more than 150 pounds.
Grab a jump rope and sandbag or other weight. For example, if you don’t have a sandbag you could use a dumbbell or kettlebell.
Do the workout.
Note: The video above walks you through the workout. The video below shows details of the exercises.
We’ve also included swaps if you face fitness or gear constraints. Remember: Anyone can Burn the Ships.
The warmup
The Two Percent Warmup is perfect for this.
