Housekeeping
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Audio/podcast edition
The post
It’s the first Friday of the month. Which means it’s time to Burn the Ships.
A couple of weeks ago, we ran two posts covering VO2 and how to determine your VO2 score at home for free (no lab-based, expensive testing involved).
October’s Burn the Ships is inspired by what I learned reporting on VO2.
Our workout will help you figure out where your endurance stands.
We’ve included a calculator to give you a proxy for how your performance in the workout equates to a VO2 score.
You can return to this Burn the Ships to determine how your endurance is faring.
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: Endure
Why the name?
We’re leaning into some of the fundamentals of testing and building your VO2.
Understanding your fitness doesn’t take complicated, lab-based testing.
It just takes a will to endure—to burn the ships …
… and burn them often. This workout will give you a marker of endurance that you can return to time and time again to see where you stand.
Where to do this workout
Outside.
Equipment needed
Shoes you can run or ruck in.
A sunny disposition.
Time commitment
40-60 minutes.
What I’m listening to while doing this workout
One of my favorite musicians, Billy Strings, was headlining a music festival in Colorado on September 27 and 28.
But then his wife went into labor, so Billy hopped on a plane to be there for the birth of his first child.
His band stepped in and delivered a hell of a show. But because Strings was there, he refunded everyone’s ticket.
He wrote on Instagram: “I’m happy to get refunds out. I know that shit’s expensive as hell and this might be the only concert all year for some folks. Could have been some folks’ first time trying to come see me and I wasn’t there. There’s no way I was gonna just keep the bread… I’ll take this one on the chin because business is business… and y’all didn’t get what you paid for. Plenty more concerts to come. Much love.”
So let’s send some bread back his way for being such a good dude.
How to do it
Here’s the standard version of Endure.
