Burn the Ships: February 2025
This month's workout: Love Potion No. 9
Housekeeping
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Podcast/audio edition
The post
It’s the first Friday of the month—which means it’s time to Burn the Ships.
On the first Friday of every month, we publish a new Burn the Ships 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, mindset, and—in turn—your life.
We’ve provided scaled versions and exercise swaps, so anyone and everyone can do them. We’ve also included instructional videos of each exercise.
In other words, we’re pushing edges and improving safely. It’s easy to be hard but hard to be smart.
This month, we’re definitely burning the ships.
We have a challenging workout that’ll crank through calories, work your entire body, and truly test your endurance and strength-to-weight ratio (which I consider the most important strength metric).
Our workout is called Love Potion No. 9 in honor of Valentine’s Day. You’ll probably hate me as you do this workout—but love me later on when your fitness improves.
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
Section summary: Doing one tough workout a week seems to be the sweet spot for health and fitness.
I started doing one tough workout every Friday after 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.
This month's workout: Love Potion No. 9
Why the name?
I firmly believe Love Potion No. 9 is one of the greatest pop songs.
It’s about a man looking for love. He buys a love potion called Love Potion No. 9 from a gypsy who lives at 34th and Vine.
The potion works so well that it causes him to fall in love with everything he sees.
When it comes to health, we’re sometimes like the man in the song: Looking for a quick fix to get fit in less time.
The bad news: Love, fitness, and most other good things in life don’t come quickly or easily.
This workout isn’t easy—but it’s one of the quicker ways to get fit.
Equipment needed
A pullup bar
A single light-ish weight like a dumbbell, kettlebell, or sandbag.
Time commitment
60-ish minutes.
What I’m listening to while doing this workout
Obviously.
How to do it
Here’s the standard version of Love Potion No. 9.
The warmup
The Two Percent warmup is great for this.
The workout
Do the exercises in the order shown, one after the other.