On January 29th I made a simple decision. For the next 42 days I would do five get-ups per day on each arm. The weight I would use on any given day didn’t matter. The rep arrangement didn’t matter. And if I missed a day, I’d make up the reps at some point within a few days. But no matter what else happened, I was going to do 200 get-ups/side within the next 42 days.
You see, I had fallen into a bit of a rut and hadn’t really done what I’d consider to be a “reasonable training session” since roughly October. That’s not to say that I hadn’t done anything active; I was hiking once or twice each weekend, went indoor rock climbing a couple times with my brother, and randomly did a few presses, swings, pushups, or pullups before or after coaching a class at TNT. But I hadn’t attended a jiu jitsu class (as a participant, not a coach) in months, and none of the other stuff that I had been doing was particularly taxing.
My excuse for not training was that I was busy with the back end of the business and some other related side projects. Plus a few other excuses that are even more lame. What can I say?!? Trainers are human too. And as such, we sometimes fall into our own bad habits and start to pay a little too much attention to the voice in our heads saying that we can pick it up tomorrow… or the next day… or, well, maybe the day after that.
In any case, I knew I needed to snap out of my funk. But I also knew that I did have a couple legitimate time & energy constraints and would likely not stick with any type of time-intensive or extremely challenging training program.
I needed something simple. Something that I could discipline myself to do regularly and for the main purpose of rebuilding a habit. Something that I would enjoy (which makes the “discipline” part far easier). And, of course, I still wanted to get stronger in some useful way.
That’s when I remembered a German research-based, strength-oriented training template that I had learned about over a decade ago at a workshop with Pavel and Dan John. They dubbed the template “Even Easier Strength”.
I’ve used it intermittently to great success since. And every time I do it, I wonder why I don’t do it more. I should—I actually have made the commitment to do so after my experience this time through—and so should you!
The guidelines are simple:
- Do the same thing for the next 40 days or, at least, 5 days/week for 8 weeks.
- Pick 1 – 5 exercises. Choose one or a combo of an upper body push, upper body pull, squat, hinge, and/or a high-tension abdominal movement.
- Do 2 sets of 5 reps for most strength-based lifts (e.g. deadlift, press, squat), 1 set of 20 – 50 reps for explosive movements (e.g. swings, snatches), and 1 set of 5 reps for the abs.
- Don’t worry about the weight. Anything in the 40 – 80% range of what you’re capable of doing is fine. Go heavy “naturally”.
- Keep the rest periods short between sets of a single exercise. A solid guideline is about a minute.
- Get stronger.
Doesn’t seem that complicated, right?
Although you might also be thinking that it doesn’t look hard enough to produce any meaningful results. But if so, well, you’d be wrong…
Today is day 37 of my get-up plan. I’ve “missed” a handful of days, but I’ve also stuck with my decision to make up any reps that I miss. I’ve used weights from 24 kg (53 lbs) to 48 kg (106 lbs). (My max is 145 lbs on a barbell, although that was also done a handful of years ago.) None of the sessions have seemed particularly challenging, and yet my strength has increased fairly substantially in just over 5 weeks. I feel good about having stayed disciplined to something I promised myself that I’d do. And, perhaps most importantly, I’m actually enjoying the training—simple as it may be—and have been intentional about slowly adding some pullups, pushups, and mobility work to the daily mix.
Here’s my get-up log (and results so far), if you’re curious about the details.
Putting it into practice
Whatever you’re currently doing (or not doing) for training, pick at least one exercise to do for the next 40 days. Then commit to doing 10 reps per day with whatever weight you feel relatively comfortable using on any given day. If you happen to miss a day, don’t beat yourself up. Just make up for it sometime in the subsequent few days. If you start tomorrow, you’ll be both mentally and physically stronger by April 17th.