The Programming for Sub-6 Minute Miles and 30 Strict Pull Ups

Hey, Athletes! The Programming for Sub-6 Minute Miles and 30 Strict Pull Ups - Episode of The Garage Gym Athlete Podcast is up!

The Programming for Sub-6 Minute Miles and 30 Strict Pull Ups

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IN THIS 30-MINUTE EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

• Jerred breaks down his current training
• He gives a quick history of training and injury over the last 1-2 years
• He discusses why he has switched to this training and his specific goals
• Breaks down how he is going to accomplish it.
• And A LOT MORE!!

Diving Deeper…

If you want to go a little bit deeper on this episode, here are some links for you: 

Reference these studies for this week!

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 Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week 

• The Programming for Sub-6 Minute Miles and 30 Strict Pull Ups

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Thanks for listening to the podcast, and if you have any questions be sure to add it to the comments below!

To becoming better!

- Jerred

Podcast Transcript

Jerred: Hey, real quick, before we start the podcast, if you have listened to more than one episode. Can you do me a favor and rate and review the show now? I'm not big on asking for favors But we really want to get this podcast listed in the top of all health and fitness podcasts Not just the fitness category this will take you less than a minute and if you could do that would make us friends forever and since we refuse all Sponsors on the show this will be my only ask rather than telling you to go check out some supplement or product We don't actually believe in every other podcast out there.

So please rate and review. Okay, that's it to the podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Garage Gym Athlete podcast. Just me today. And today I'm going to be doing a different type of video or podcast. I'm going to be talking about my own personal training, some of my goals right now, and specifically the programming I am tackling and how to go about it.

Now in future videos on the YouTube channel, I actually want to show what my training is. So if you are just listening right now on the garage gym athlete podcast, make sure you go subscribe to the YouTube channel where I won't be able to show training, obviously an audio only format, but that is what's coming today.

It's more talking about what I'm going to be doing, what I've actually been doing for the last couple of weeks. And what the next phase of training for me looks like. And how this all got started. So quick backstory, you've probably heard me talk about it multiple times. I went on a, a quest to do what we call BCT boring concurrent training.

And that's where I was going after a 500 pound back squat and a five minute mile in the same day. Ended up getting injured in that process. And every time I would try to add performance, get stronger, get faster. Every time I would end up getting hurt again, it was the most frustrating in all honesty, probably two years of my life.

From a training standpoint, very frustrating, very just upsetting, to not be able to train how I've always trained because every time I felt like I was back to normal. I'd add more volume, add more intensity, and I ended up breaking myself again. And I've since recovered from all of that.

And I've been in a really good spot for the last couple of months. And so I've been adding more and more volume training intensity and things have been great. But what I found was most recently this past Memorial day, I did Murph and I was completely. I'm unhappy with my performance in Murph. If you don't know my backstory with the Murph workout I did it every Saturday for two years.

And I've done it a lot before that. I've done a lot in between, but ultimately I had some pretty amazing Murph times, arguably some of the fastest Murph times that have ever been completed. But I have nothing to show for that. I. I don't have that ability right now, and I don't really like talking about things that you can do in the past.

So I want to get that back. I was very pissed off with my performance in Murph this past Memorial Day. Really because I've been training, like when I was hurt, even when I was hurt, I've been training. I've been... Super consistent in training. I never stopped training. I just wasn't lifting as heavy. And then I had to completely stop running for a very long period of time.

Which made me pretty bad at running. I'm the worst at running I've ever been right now. And when I brought this back, when I first started bringing it back, it was November, December of last year. And then I still ran into having some lower back issues. And then I had to work on that most of this year.

And again, between physical therapy, chiropractic care, all the stuff I'm feeling great, and I've added a lot of mileage. I even waited before I filmed this video or started to talk about anything, making sure I'm getting enough, volume and intensity and mileage under the belt before I start talking about these things publicly again, and then, Oh, you know what, I'm injured again and I can't do anything.

I, so I think I'm in a great spot right now. And I want to talk about what I'll be doing and what my goals are right now. And specifically the programming behind it. So what I'm looking to do right now is I just want to get really good at calisthenics and running one, because it's super, it's a safe way to push yourself right now.

Like for me, I want to push myself here before I start pushing myself under the barbell again, before I try to go any heavy weights. So I'm really just wanting to get better at calisthenics and running ultimately, because I want to crush. Murph, the next time that I do it, I really don't want a piss poor performance like my last one.

And so I'm gonna be talking today about what my goals are and the overall programming to get there. But I would say some of my goals are number one, the worst part of Murph this past Memorial Day was the run. So number one is I'm going to want to be able to run sub six. So I want to go less than six minutes.

On the mile, that's my first goal and that's something honestly, I could almost always do. And the fact that I'm not there right now is pretty frustrating. I could even go sub six during a Murph workout. And so now I, I have not tested my current time. I'm probably going to record my next baseline, even though I've been running, I've been getting some mileage under my belt.

I didn't want to go just baseline right now because I didn't know what it was going to be. After a couple of weeks of running, I'm going to film the baseline. I'm going to put it on YouTube and see where I'm at after getting at least four weeks of decent amount of mileage under my belt.

So the first goal is going to be sub six minute mile. Number two, I want to get 25 to 30 strict pull ups.

I think the most I've ever been able to do is probably 26. And this is fully strict. And when I talk about strict pull ups, I'm talking about, as long as you're hanging from the bar, it's fine. Like you, I can, it's the Marine Corps Marine Corps standard. Like as long as you're still hanging from the bar, you can continue to do pull ups and they count.

So if I'm resting at the bottom, that's fine, but I can't drop from the bar. Once I dropped from the bar, it's over. So if I do film any videos and you're like, Oh, you're resting at the bottom. Yeah, that might happen. I might knock out 20 and then I might rest at the bottom and try and do five more or maybe even 10 more.

So that's ultimately what I'd like to do. Number three, I would like to get somewhere in the. 70 plus pushup range.

That's somewhere I've definitely been before, but I haven't been in a long time. I think when I was in the military in the air force, they do a minute of pushups and I could very consistently get, a 60. 60 to 70 pushups in that minute, at the peak air force calisthenics days.

And so I want to get back into that range. So this is in a minute, not just, there's no resting in this. You can rest in the top, but this is in 60 seconds or less. So the six minute mile. Sub six minute miles is going to be sub six minute mile. I want to run fast, strict pull ups, no time limit, 25 to 30. And then pushups 70 or more with being able to do all of that in a minute or less.

So those are the goals right now. That's all I want to get good at. And then number four, tying all these together is just going to be fast Murph time.

I'm not actually putting a goal on this one yet. That'll be phase two. I really just want to put in. The fast miles, get the strict pull ups, get the push ups. I have my baseline for my Murph. And I'll share more about that in future videos, but from this past Memorial day, what my Murph time was, and then get into it a little bit more.

So let's dive into what the programming looks like for something like this. Now, the first thing, and the hardest thing that it is going to be to tackle is going to be the run. And I'll talk about calisthenics in a second, but the run is always going to be the hardest thing to get faster.

And it takes the most amount of time. And I want to talk about that for a second. So the only real way to increase or get faster and running is you could just. Practice running faster. And that's what a lot of people do. You want to, they, they just, I want to run faster. So they start running sprints or something like that.

And that will work, but it has a cap. Like it has a definite cap. It's not going to be the most. Long term it's not the best long term training program. If I just wanted to squeeze or knock off 30 to 45 seconds off my miletime right now, sure. I could just do some speed work for a couple of weeks and I would achieve that.

But if you want to be able to run sub six. Effortlessly or during a Murph workout, should I say something where it's just a part of something else, then you're going to have to increase, actually increase your aerobic base. And so the idea of increasing your base is you have to think of your fitness in every regard as a pyramid.

And this is that whole concept actually comes from Louie Simmons and he talks about a strength training. And I talk about it in aerobic training, but your fitness is a pyramid. And you're a pyramid can only be as tall as its base. Okay. So it can only be as tall as its base. So if you want a taller period, you want higher maximum performance.

You have to have a larger base. So you have to work on your base material to be able to get any faster, stronger, it works, it's the same in strength and endurance. So what does that look like for endurance training? Endurance training, if you want to get faster, you actually have to build your aerobic base, which is going to be a lot of zone two training.

Specifically the one that we like to use. I know zone two has gotten more popular a lot over the years. We've been talking about it for years too. But Phil Maffetone who was like a. coach really pioneered this whole method and he has a lot of ways that you can do it, but the base, like the easiest calculation to find out what your aerobic training zone is, your math zone as Phil Maffetone would call it is 180 minus your age.

So 180 minus your age, and that's going to give you. What your base aerobic number heart rate should be like for your target runs, right? So that is what you're targeting. And he has more specific ways of finding out your zone too, because you could have a, if you're really well trained athlete, you can have a higher max heart rate.

You could have a lower resting heart rate. The, he takes into account how many days, how many sick days you have, all this kind of stuff. But ultimately, if you want to run faster, we're going to have to increase that aerobic base. And to increase that aerobic base, we're going to be doing zone two or math work.

That's what I'm going to be doing a lot of. And so I'll be doing at least three days per week of this kind of training. And so 180 minus my age, hitting in the one 40. Five ish range somewhere around there is what I'll be shooting for to have my heart rate for these long duration, aerobic base building runs.

And they're annoying because they're not speed work. They're not actually running any faster. And then two days per week, that's when I'll work on those things. So I'll work on, either just running, actually running fast. So like a sustained threshold run running one, two, or even three miles at a zone four zone five pace.

Just as not as fast as I can go, but get into that zone and then maintain that zone. For a couple of miles that zone four, or even touching in his own five, if you're going pretty fast, that's going to help me build up my threshold. I'll be doing a ton of base work. And then at the top of the pyramid, I'll be doing a lot of repeat, work, so like hundreds, 200, 300, 400, those kinds of things to actually.

Increase my strength and increase my speed. So that's what I'm looking to do. So for calisthenics for running, that's the main thing that I'm looking to do. What that looks like over the course of a week, three days of this math zone to work and then two days is just going to be either.

Threshold training or interval based training. That's what I'm looking to do. And then when you get to, when you get to calisthenics, that's when I think it gets a little bit more challenging and people really don't know as much about these kinds of things. Like you really have to know what you're doing to program calisthenics.

And so let me dive into that. I'll get a new page here. When you get into the calisthenics world, you're going to run into basically a weird world as I've researched it and and I've done this over the years, but you'll get into a lot of people doing like human flags and all this kind of stuff.

But that's not what, if you're looking to get better at like calisthenics for Murph, that stuff really doesn't matter as much. There's a lot of amazing things. Body bodies can do like gymnastics with body weight stuff. That doesn't mean that you're going to be awesome at doing crap ton of pull ups for time or squats or push ups and all that kind of stuff.

And so I, when I look at calisthenics, I look at it from a strength training method, and so when I'm looking at it through the strength training lens I look at. There's max effort, there's sub max,

and then there's dynamic.

Again, these are some of the most proven strength methods. Again, more stuff from Westside barbell, things that Louis Simmons talks about with the max effort method and the sub max effort method and the dynamic effort method, they're very easy to implement with a barbell, but they get a little bit harder when you talk about calisthenics.

So let me talk about each one of these. So the max effort method is really just. Doing something maximally, right? It's just going to be the maximum amount of time or the maximum load you can handle all the, on the bar sub max is really just putting in like the hypertrophy work. So it's going less than your max, a 60% doing it for reps.

It builds up It builds up muscle, it builds up repetition, volume, all those kind of things. And then dynamic is the speed element. And now these are the three proven ways to get stronger and to use your muscles better. And to put it in simple terms. And so how do we take those kinds of ideas and put them into a calisthenics training program?

With the dynamic effort method, you can do two things. You can do fast calisthenics.

And when I say fast calisthenics, I'm not just talking about doing a pushup faster than normal, because that's really most people do pushups as fast as they can already when they're doing pushups. So when I talk about fast calisthenics, I'm talking about explosive.

So something like a clapping pushup or a plate pushup, those are what you're going to be doing when you are. Looking to get more speed in speed produces power. And so if you're getting if you're going, if you're practicing moving faster, you're becoming more powerful. This is what's actually making you stronger.

So you want to make sure that you're doing fast calisthenics, explosive calisthenics. So that's one way. To do it is like I mentioned, you could do clapping pushups. You could do that kind if you're like really advanced in pull ups, you could even do, I don't want to say a clapping pull up, but they pull up so fast that you could raise your hands up off the top of the bar.

That is a very advanced move, or even being able to do that on ring rows things like that. But an even better way because fast calisthenics, they they tap out really fast. Yeah. Okay. We got clapping pushups. We got some crazy pull ups. I'm talking about who can do some of these things and who can really throw them in.

And so the other thing that you can do is accommodating resistance. So for accommodating resistance, think about if you've ever seen someone put chains on a barbell, when. What happens when you're squatting and you have chains on a barbell, all the links are on the ground. And when you start squatting up and it's going up higher and higher, more chains or more links are being slowly added to that weight.

So as you go up, the weight is being accommodated. Now we don't need to add chains into our calisthenics, but bands, we can do a lot of banded training, and this is the best way. To add a more dynamic style of training into your calisthenics and is often missing. Cause everyone has the sub max effort method in their program if you're doing calisthenics, but if you add bands, you're really going to become a very powerful athlete and very good at calisthenics very fast.

So what does it look like to add bands to calisthenics training? You could add, you could wrap a band around your back and put it on your wrists and do pushups. So when you're going to that top of that pushup, you have accommodating resistance. You could do this with sit ups, you could attach a band to a kettlebell and put it around your chest and under your armpits.

And every time you sit up, as you increase your range of motion. You're getting resistance on the band, making the pull up a little bit harder. Likewise, on a pull up, you could wrap the the band around the. Around the kettlebell and you could wrap that around your traps and down your chest. And so when you're pulling up, you're doing a pull up the band is accommodating the resistance as you pull up the band is anchored to the kettlebell on the ground.

Just making sure that these kettlebells are heavy enough to where they don't actually move when you are doing these exercises. And so then also with squats, you could. Wrap, all these bands are giant circles, right? So you could wrap it around your shoulders, step on the band, and then just do your air squats with band.

So a little bit of added accommodating resistance, and you can get crazy because there are bands that have, 50 pounds of resistance, up to 500 plus pounds of resistance at the top when they're stretched out. And so something to think about. In a calisthenics program, technically, we would not being be using only our body.

Like I do think that in a good calisthenics program, you'll have some sort of band or dynamic effort in there. If you wanted to truly be, Hey, I'm cows only. You could do all the explosive movements that I was talking about. You just have to find a way to do those in each one of those realms based off of your specific capability.

And so this is the missing element in every strength program I've ever seen, and especially when it comes to calisthenics and these will get you so much these will get you so much better calisthenics so much faster if you're adding dynamic stuff in there. Now the sub max in max effort.

Method are a little bit different when it comes to calisthenics. So max effort in cows calisthenics, there is no there is no one rep max.

So typically what we go to when we're doing max effort is going to be time domain,

and I like to keep it more how like the military does it. So maximum amount of reps that you can do. In 60 seconds in one minute, in a minute and a half, something like that, because we don't have a maximal load when we're doing body weight only stuff. So that when there's no one at max, we go to time and then time becomes our what we're trying to race against to become, to be able to do more.

As I mentioned in my goals, like for pushups I want to be able to do 70 plus in a minute. So that's my, that would be my maximum effort, my maximum time trial. So you want to add these into your training where you have a little bit more of you have you have more volume being done in a certain amount of time.

So it's going to produce a better strength gains in calisthenics overall when you're doing this. But another way that I like to do it, I like to look at it differently. And this is more for hypertrophy, but I throw it in the max effort method because with max, you're going to reach failure, right? You can reach failure in anything, but that it happens faster and maximum effort.

Like you either can or you can't write it when you're trying max attempts. And so the way that I like to do this with calisthenics is time under.

And this is often missing in calisthenics programs as well. So when we're looking at time under tension, this is where a lot of hypertrophy can be gained. Okay, so this is where a lot of you can actually still build muscle with calisthenics if you are focusing enough with time under tension. And so with time under tension, what that looks like in calisthenics, It's just doing slow and controlled repetitions, and that's how you know the most basic level.

I typically recommend like a 2, 2, 2, or a 3, 3, 3 tempo for all of your calisthenics. At some point in your program when you're doing when you're trying to get better at them So that would be two seconds on the way down like on a push up So say we start in the we start in the arms locked out position top of the push up Two seconds on the way down two second pause at the bottom two seconds on the way up two second pause at the top So a lot of slow and controlled movement That's a lot of time under tension and this is a proven way to get a lot stronger in calisthenics And we're just in strength in general.

Now there's also a lot of research that says that when you're doing time under tension, the most optimal way to do it is to slow the eccentric portion, but then speed up the concentric portion. And this is also something that Louie Simmons had in his teaching for Westside barbell is typically.

You want to go slow and controlled. If we just go back to the pushup example, slow and controlled on the way down, you can pause at the bottom, but then on the way up, explosive explode on the way up, there's not a lot of reason to go slow on the concentric phase of a lift or of a repetition, but my argument backwards to that is if you're not actually well trained and you're not that good at calisthenics yet, I think that you should just do everything slow and controlled.

Assuming you're doing all three of these things in your program. So if you're doing all three of these things in your program, and you're not that great at calisthenics, don't worry about the concentric eccentric phase. Just go. Slow on the way down, hold it slow on the way up, hold it. And just do repetitions like that.

You're gaining more motor control and you're gaining better better control over your muscles and you're learning a lot more in doing so. And I think that's going to be better for you. Then in the next phase of training, you can worry about going okay, I'm going to do four seconds on the way down to second pause, explode up.

But that's as you're getting more advanced. So you want to get as much time under tension as possible. Now, if you're doing these two things, if you're doing time under tension and you're doing either fast or accommodating resistance, you are going to get so much better at calisthenics than you've ever been, because most of the time, all people do to try and get better at calisthenics is what I'll end with here, and that's the sub max effort method.

And this is just do them. That's it. Submax effort when it comes to calisthenics is just doing repetitions. So doing, a hundred reps a day, 200 reps a day, 300 reps a day, whatever it is, that's all the submax effort method is going to be. There's no other component here. There's just do them. And so this is what you want to look like.

What you want a calisthenics program to look like if you want to get a lot better at it So you got to have the dynamic effort in there doing fast calisthenics Explosive have some accommodating a risk resistance with bands for the max effort method you want to put some time domain See how many repetitions you can squeeze into a minute doing that You know once twice a week and then you want to get a lot of time under tension Maybe only doing 5, 7, 8, 10 reps at a time, but holding with these 2, or the 3 tempos, something like that.

Then after all that, you want to be able to do, just put in the reps, 30 reps, 40 reps, 50 reps every single set. And doing that for every single... So this would be doing it for the push up for the pull up for the sit up for the squat, all of these things. And if you're doing all of these things, all three methods in one training session, and you're doing all four of the exercises I just mentioned, and you're doing this for multiple sets, this is easily an hour to an hour and a half.

Training session. These are not easy training sessions. Sometimes people think that when you move to calisthenics training, like you're taking it easy or whatever, but the fact that your body can recover really easily from these things, most of the time, and the fact that you, if you are not training with a barbell or kettlebell or anything like that anymore.

These training sessions need to be hard because this is not a time to relax and lose a whole lot of gains because you decided to hop on a calisthenics and running program. You need to be doing all of these things and it can be very challenging. And then on the running side, it's putting in the miles that are appropriate for you.

I've gone so slow and increasing my mileage. Before I even filmed this, I was only doing five miles per week to make sure that I wasn't gonna get injured. And then I increased just by 10 to 15%. So then I, jumped up to still, between five and 10 and miles per week. Then I got to 10 miles per week, then I got to 11 or 12 miles per week, then 13 miles per week, then 15 miles per week.

And right now I'm at the 15 to 20 and I'm just gonna hang out there for a little while. Cause that's a decent amount for me. So I'll probably stay there and then I might cap out. Like I probably won't ever put in more than 30 ish miles a week in this training program and probably be 25 to 30, something like that.

Because when you're only trying to run a mile, it really fast. You don't need 35, 40 miles per week. All so that's everything on the running, how to have a remarkable, running program and calisthenics program and, how to do them in conjunction. Your body can very easily recover from these things, especially like the first week might be rough, but after that your body will learn pretty quickly how to recover.

So that's it now, like I said, I will be updating you all more. So this, we have a new training cycle kicking off at garage gym athlete right now, as this is being published. And I'm actually not participating for the first time in a long time in that 12 week cycle. I'm going all calisthenics and running.

For my very specific goals. But I wanted to keep the community updated on what I'm doing. And like I said, even more updated, I'll be doing some YouTube videos of some actual training sessions, talking more about these things, and then also sharing my results and filming some of those things, see how I actually do with the.

Mild times, how well my calisthenics improve all of those kinds of things. But that's all I have for this one. If you do want to join our next training session, now is our next training cycle. Now's a great time to do that. And if you want to follow along and what I'm doing, I'll be publishing content on that throughout this cycle as well.

But that's it for this one for everyone who's a part of the community. I appreciate you so much for anyone who's thinking about joining, go ahead and do that at garagegymathlete. com. Sign up for a free trial. Remember, if you don't kill comfort will kill you. To the garage gym athlete podcast.

If you want to learn more, go to garagegymathlete. com. You can learn about our training. Let us send you a copy of our book, the garage gym athlete, or you can even get featured on the garage gym athlete podcast. Thanks for listening.