The Tactical Strength Challenge (TSC) was this past Saturday. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a three-event lifting competition: a one-rep max deadlift, strict pull-ups for max reps (or a flexed-arm hang for time), and as many kettlebell snatches as you can do in five minutes. A handful of TNT members competed, and so did I—my first TSC in six or seven years.
My results were certainly respectable—and considering my training, I’m not disappointed in them. For the past few years (until the TSC prep program leading up to this one), I’ve trained mostly for climbing mountains and Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ). I also missed more than two weeks of training near the end of the program while hiking roughly 50 miles through the mountains in Peru. (And it showed—on my first day back in the gym, I couldn’t do what I’d done the week before I left.)
But I’m not particularly happy with my results, either. Here’s how they compared to my PRs (which weren’t all set at the same meet):
- Deadlift: 415 lbs (PR: 540)
- Pull-ups: 18 (PR: 29)
- Snatches with a 24-kg kettlebell: 104 (PR: 129)
(I weighed around 180 pounds for all of them, this TSC included, so body weight isn’t the difference.)
What a test tells you that training doesn’t
Every training program requires tradeoffs. Time and energy spent on one thing is time and energy that doesn’t go toward something else. That’s fine—you can’t train everything at once, and you shouldn’t try to.
The catch is that you don’t necessarily feel the tradeoffs happening. Over the past few years, I was getting better day to day at what I was training for, but nothing in those sessions told me how much other things had slipped. Of course, based on general training and coaching experience, I knew the TSC lifts were down (especially the deadlift), but I didn’t know how far down until Saturday.
That’s what a test does. It turns a vague sense (“I’m probably not as strong as I used to be”) into a number. And once you have a hard number, you can make a decision about it.
If you’re OK with where the tradeoffs have left you, accepting them is a perfectly legitimate choice—maintaining everything else is a goal in its own right. Other times, the number shows that you’ve drifted further from something you care about than you realized and that it’s time to change course.
Either way, you’re choosing instead of drifting.
I wrote about this concept a few years ago when I started calling our progress tests at TNT “adaptation evaluations.” The idea was to go into a test curious about how your body adapted to your training rather than keeping score. I went into this TSC with that mindset, and it helped me keep a healthy perspective: It was good to get back to testing/competition. It’s OK to have mixed emotions about the results. And future progress depends on honestly noting what the last few years of training produced and where current abilities stand.
What I’m taking from it
It’s only been a few days, so I haven’t thoroughly thought it through. But my initial take is that I want to emphasize strength development more, specifically on the deadlift and pull-up.
Being stronger in those two lifts has helped my climbing and BJJ in the past. It also transfers well to carrying heavy things, which is a big part of time in the mountains.
And strength tends to help “endurance”—including the TSC’s pull-up rep test—more than most people expect. Basically, the stronger you are, the easier each rep is. That means, all else (like your conditioning) being equal, you can do more and/or perform for longer before tiring. (When I set my deadlift PR, I also did 27 or 28 pull-ups even though I hadn’t really been training them. But squeezing—and strengthening—my lats on hundreds of heavy deadlift reps carried over.)
Putting it into practice
When was the last time you actually tested the movements that are important to you—or, at least, movements that require the characteristics that are important to you? (For reference, your test doesn’t need to be an actual competition—although the corresponding adrenaline boost usually provides a slight additional edge. A few movements you check on your own every few months or once or twice a year will do just fine. And if you’ve never tested, your first one simply gives you a baseline, which is what makes the next one useful.)
If it was recently, did the results affect how you train?
If it’s been a while, are you confident that your fitness is in line with what you want it to be?
If you hesitated on that last one, it might be time to find out (or, potentially, to figure out specifically what it is that you want).