The LAST Calisthenics Program You Will Ever Need

Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week

Podcast Transcript

Jerred (00:01)
All right, welcome back to the Garage Gym Athlete podcast. Today we are going to be going over the Strike Zero program. I've been talking about it for months off and on. I've actually talked about this in previous episodes, but it's been a long time and the program has evolved quite a bit. So if you are looking for an amazing calisthenics program with some conditioning to add to your training right now, whether that's because it's the holidays and maybe you don't have access to the gym or you're traveling, whatever the case is, this is an amazing program. It's one of the best.

calisthenics only programs I have ever written and I have performed. I know that's like a bold statement, but we have I've created many different programs over the years systems all these kind of things and this has become my favorite my go-to and it's something that can be done in conjunction with the program and I'll talk about how to utilize it. But let's get straight into it Dave's here as well. He'll be making sure that as I explain the strike zero program. I don't lose anyone. Okay, so

because I know most of the people consuming the Garage Dimathly podcast are audio only listeners, even though we are on YouTube, if you want to go check that out. So anyway, from an audio perspective, I'm going to be making sure that it makes sense, or Dave's going to make sure it makes sense as we go through it. All right, you ready, Dave?

Dave (01:15)
do it.

Jerred (01:17)
Alright, strike zero. There are six things you need to know right off the bat. And so I'm to go over all of those real quick so you know how to utilize the program. The first thing is strike zero is a three day per week program. I've done six days per week where I just repeat all three of these workouts twice in a week. That is quite taxing. So I do recommend it being a three day per week program. That's thing number one. Thing number two. This is how strike zero works.

And the whole reason it's kind of it's called strike zero if you have 25 pull-ups as the target So that's typically what you start with and I'll get over Actual prescriptions here in a minute, but if you have 25 pull-ups as the target you're gonna go do a max set of pull-ups So this is to failure and so say you did 10 pull-ups You would subtract that from the 25 or strike it out. So I have 25 written Let's say on a whiteboard. I strike out the 25. I'm gonna write 15. I have 15 reps left

and I'm going to continue until I strike and then hit zero, right? That's why it's called the strike zero program. That's the second thing. Third thing, rest is strict at only 60 seconds between every set. Now, here's what I'll say about this and where you can tailor it based off of your fitness level and how well your body deals with fatigue, specifically in calisthenics.

If you're like, I need to rest more than that. I need to rest 90 seconds. I need to rest two minutes. I need to rest three minutes. That's fine. But it has to remain consistent for whatever you pick. And the reason being is because I've tested this. This is why there are all these rules to the program. I've done three minutes rest in between sets. And that program is drastically different than 60 seconds for me. So like, let's say on my pull ups, I want to do 50 in a session or even 100 in a session. My first set's going to be over 20.

And then if I rest three minutes, my next set is probably going to be 17, 18. But if I do 20 and only rest 60, by the time I get back to pull-ups, that set's going to be like nine or 10. So it's just a drastically different program. So the rest does need to be strict. I like 60 seconds because it really taxes you. But if you want to rest longer, you can. It just needs to be the same throughout.

Alright, the fourth thing, you move through it as a superset. if we were doing pull-ups, dips, and step-ups in a program, it would be max set of pull-ups, rest 60 seconds, max set of dips, rest 60 seconds, max set of step-ups, each leg, and then rest 60 seconds, and then you'd start over at the top of the pull-ups until you just keep working down until you get to zero. And another thing people have asked me when doing the program,

is like what if I run out of pull-ups first? What if I run out of dips first? That one's just eliminated, right? So if you get through all the dips, just, that one's no longer happening. You're just doing pull-ups and step-ups until you finish all, all and you've struck zero all the way through. All right, thing number five. And this is again, tailoring it to your individual level. If you cannot complete the reps assigned in six or fewer sets, lower the reps by 10 to 20.

and then also never do more than six sets for any given exercise. So this is kind of where I'm building in the anti-rabdoh portion that this could lead to, okay? So if you're like, Jared says he does 100 pull-ups, I want to do 100 pull-ups in my workout, in my strike zero workouts, like, yeah, but I don't know how many pull-ups you're capable of and what's ridiculous. But if you're getting to sets of one, strike zero, you're probably doing it incorrectly, right? And I've tried that. That's how the program started. It's too aggressive.

and it's too aggressive for most people. So if it's taking you more than six sets, you need to reassess, just call it a day on that one and then come back the next training day and don't do as many reps. And then the last thing is within that vein, if it's too easy, because that can happen as well, because we're going to get to exercise prescriptions here in a second, but if you can complete all the reps in three sets or fewer, you need to increase reps. Okay, so if I set the goal as like,

Yeah, I want to do 25 pull-ups and I do 20 on my first set and five on my second set and I'm done, already, I'm strike zero, done. That's not a good program, right? That's not going to be helpful. I'm not doing enough to actually challenge me. So I need to go add, okay, let's go up to 35, let's go up to 45, whatever the case is. So those are the rules. That's like the baseline set of rules before we get into like, here's exactly what the workouts are. Any questions about those rules, Dave, before we get into like the prescriptions?

Dave (05:41)
Yeah, would you say reps is like, is that the main thing people should be adjusting before adjusting rest or any of those things? that be the first place people should start?

Jerred (05:52)
Yeah, I think I'll probably give you like it depends kind of answer. It depends on what you're going for. Like we've talked about my goal being like wanting to be better at Murph, right? And so my goal is going to have the least amount of rest that's feasible. But if you're actually someone who's like, just want more strict pull ups, then more rest might be appropriate. And then the two things that I do track.

And you can track, you don't have to track them, but if you just want to like see how you're progressing is average reps per set in your first rep set. So that's two different things. like if it took you, you know, if you did 50 reps in five sets, your average rep per set is 10. But then if you are wanting to track that like overarching, like kind of max rep power, then also track your first set reps. So if I did 25 pull ups my first set,

I want to know that because then I want to know if I got 26 the next time or 27. So those two things are great things to track on top of that. But yeah, I would start with messing with the reps and then adjusting to the rest unless you're just like, no, my main goal here is I want to be able to do 15 strict pull ups or 20 strict pull ups. Then I would I would rest a little bit more. I won't lie. 60 seconds is aggressive. Like it is this is not an easy program when you're doing 60 seconds. It's very hard to just.

not stop moving as you go through the Strike Zero program.

Dave (07:19)
And if someone wants to keep 60 seconds, how important is the training to failure piece of it in terms of like training to true failure versus leaving one or two reps in reserve and being able to hit that 60 second rest consistently.

Jerred (07:31)
Yeah, I would say you're gonna want to take every set to either failure or one to two reps in reserve. Either one of those is gonna be fine. And the reason I say that is because I really want most people to hit failure on that first set. I feel like that's the most important thing. It's like a pre-fatigue for the rest of the workout. And then all the rest of the sets to get to that zero, you can, if you want one or two left reps in reserve, I think that that's fine because...

Honestly, I can't tell much of a difference with how fatigued I end up getting through the program. The first set on everything's great, but then with those 60 second rest and then immediately rolling into my second set, I'm like, yeah, I'm already tired. Like there's not much of a difference in my opinion and my muscles probably don't think much of a difference between having two reps in reserve versus true failure, I can't do another rep.

Dave (08:18)
think last question around that, you, like, so say you're in a pushup, are you max reps that you can keep moving on, or are you literally locking out the top and trying to get as many reps as possible? Or same thing, like, pull up, you're hanging at the bottom to try and squeak out a few more reps, or are you just doing what you can consistently move with? Yep.

Jerred (08:35)
So you're just talking about like the form, like the execution of the reps?

Yeah. You know, that's a good question. With push-ups, I am just trying to knock out as many as possible because I can make 10 push-ups really suck. You know, like even on my first set, I could just go real slow on the way down and up. So I keep every, going back to that Murph example, just because that's one of my goals. It's like whatever.

reps would be acceptable in a Murph workout for pushups for me. Like that's kind of the, want to do it fast. I want to knock them out fast. Same with pull-ups. cause there's a time and a place to execute these things like in a different way or different modality. Like maybe I do want to go slower. Maybe I want to focus on eccentric or isometric like we've talked about in previous podcasts. But for me that, you know, what would be acceptable in a Murph workout still be considered a rep is what's a go for me.

Dave (09:21)
Yep, I think that's helpful for some that. I was wondering with like step ups though, I'm like, how do you take step ups to failure? Because I'm like, you could always do another step up type of thing compared to a pull up, you're going to burn out on it.

Jerred (09:29)
Yeah, so

let's talk about that. And I think that's a great way to introduce the first workout. So there are three workouts. There's a workout A, workout B, workout C. So let's talk about the overall structure of these. And so what happens is every workout has a pull, a push, a lower, and then a conditioning workout. And I'm to go over all of those. And then it increases in reps every single week. And what I'm going to give you is just what I think is a starting point for a lot of people.

But again, if you know that you're good at pull ups, you're good at dips or whatever, go ahead and make the adjustments before you start and then just increase each week for three weeks. In that fourth week, you'll deload. Either take completely off, do something else, cut the reps in half, 50%, something like that. Deloads are really important. So workout A, you're going to do pull ups, you're going to do dips, you're going to do step ups, and I'll get to the conditioning last. So the week one, I have 25 reps for the pull up, 30 reps for the dip, and 100 reps for the step up.

And so let's start at the step ups. Like, okay, it's a hundred total reps is where I think people should start. You could do a hundred per leg if you wanted to, but you're right. When I would do squats or step ups or lunges, there was never this like, okay, I can't do another one. But what drastically changed that for me was doing things single leg and not giving the, ⁓ your leg a break as the other leg performed the exercise. So if I'm doing step ups,

I won't even actually need to take my foot off the box because there's not a lot of value in lowering the foot from the top of the box to the floor, right? Like you're getting all the eccentric and just coming all the way back down and the concentric on the way up. And so that has changed things drastically for me in executing the program. So I will do step up with the right leg and it'll just be right leg, right leg, right leg, right leg.

And what I found is like, can honestly do like 200 reps straight if I'm alternating, this starts to fatigue at like, I start to feel it at around 40 and then 60 or 70, I'm really like, okay, like this probably isn't true failure, but I'm probably good. And so again, you're probably never going to reach true failure, especially if your legs are pretty trained, but that's, that's been my approach right there for step ups and all the lower body stuff. Cause it, failure is very hard in these.

And then dips, I don't think there's a lot to cover there. I do them on straight bar. You could do them bench dips however you want, pull ups or pull ups. So week one is 25 reps pull ups. For pull ups, week two is 50 reps. Week three is 75 reps. And then like I said, move to deload. For dips, it would be week one, 30 reps. Week two, 60 reps. Week three, 90 reps. And then step ups, 100 reps, 150 reps, 200 reps for week one and week two and week three.

And again, adjust those based off of your preferences and what you know to be true about your abilities. Any questions there?

Dave (12:24)
Is that, so like a 30, 60, 90 for a given movement, is that like typical three week progression people should look at or are you adjusting that purely based on how you perform, like based on how things go?

Jerred (12:35)
Yeah, I would make drastic adjustments based off of the rules from the beginning. Because if you're like, I don't know where to start, I'll just start with Jared's week one, and you are hitting less than three sets, or it's taking you more than six sets, then you need to make those adjustments on the reps from there. And that's a wide range, like add 20 reps, or add 10 reps, or take away 10, or take away 20, and you'll know after you do it. You'll be able to tailor it to your ability quite quickly. So sometimes the first week might just be like a...

almost like a baseline, it's like an adjustment. It's like trying to find out where you fit in this program and where your reps really need to be because I think total reps is really important.

Dave (13:11)
people taking notes too, so going back to some of the rules. So if you're doing pull-ups, dips, and step-ups, the pull-ups are getting much more than a minute rest, right? Because it's a superset. So you're pull-ups, and then it rests 60 seconds, rests during the dip time. So you're maybe getting five minutes rest in between that.

Jerred (13:26)
Yeah, so yeah, you'd pull up, rest, dips, rest, step ups, rest, but again, even after the step ups, it's only 60 seconds and then you're back to pull ups. So it's enough time to like regenerate to be able to do them, but you're still fatigued from all the other exercises. And that's why, like I said, I've played with, what do they call it? The self-adjusted rest, I forgot the term for it. It's like where...

I just let my body decide when I wanted to do the next set. Not being lazy, but it's like, you know, I feel recovered. I'm going to do the next one. And the workout was just insanely different. I was like crushing everything because I was giving myself so much rest. I was able to knock out everything so fast. It was just so much different of a workout. So yeah, the rest is important. You're getting enough before you hit pull ups again. Because if you just did pull up 60 seconds, pull up 60 seconds, that would turn into like the one rep version that we don't want to want to do.

Dave (14:15)
And maybe we can talk progressions, progressions, regressions maybe. Are you keeping those same movements the three days so that pull-ups are done every single day? Are you doing a different push-pull leg movement?

Jerred (14:24)
No, yeah,

we can get to workout B and C. So I'll say the conditioning for workout A is burpee and wrap. As many burpees as you can possibly do week one, five minutes, week two, six minutes, week three, seven minutes. And again, you adjust this based off of your ability. I typically start at seven minutes and then I do eight or I do seven, eight and 10. I think I end at 10 minutes in my third week and it's crappy, but I like to be able to track again, going back to averages, how many burpees I'm doing per minute.

because instead of doing the same workout over and over again and saying, hey, am I getting a higher score? It's like, am I able to maintain a certain amount of burpees per minute for each minute, even when I add time? So that's the conditioning element of that. And it's done quickly, it sucks, and it's a good workout.

Dave (15:08)
you've tried subbing there.

Jerred (15:10)
No, not for workout A. So each one has a different conditioning element. But for workout A, I've only done burpees because, yeah, and going back to the whole like, I want to do this while I'm traveling. I want to do this with minimal equipment. I never really want something. There's only one thing on here that technically you need some equipment for. I'm not considering a pull-up bar equipment, and we'll get into that. So workout B, very similar structure. Again, pull, push, lower, and conditioning. Workout B.

The pull is going to be a ring row. The push is going to be push-ups. And then lower body is going to be lunges. And then the ring row progresses 25, 50, 75. The push-ups are 50, 100, 150. Lunges are 100, 150, 200. So same format. Probably don't have to hash it out as long, but ring row, push-ups, lunges. And that way you're hitting all of the same, to your point, like your question is like...

You're hitting all the same muscle groups, but like kind of in different way. Like we're getting push, pull and lower every training session, but it's not just the same movements over and over again. So you come into pull ups that next a week later, you know, super fresh, not having to do pull ups again and again and again.

Dave (16:19)
and step forward and step back, keep doing the same leg as many as you can.

Jerred (16:23)
Yeah, sometimes I'll do reverse lunge. And I won't lie, I've added a vest to this workout too. So again, going back to your ability, like that's how I would progress this over time because it got to a point where I was like, I can't put 200 pull-ups on there. Like it's just, too many. And so I'm just adding weight to the vest, starting with a 20 pound, going up to 30 pound, going up to 40 pound vest and letting that be my limiting factor as opposed to just always adding reps. And then the conditioning workout for this one.

This is just specifically what I've been doing. talked about it in previous podcasts. You don't have to do this, but it's the 10 minute AMRAP, or it's the AMRAP of MERF broken down into mini sets, right? So it's 160 meter run, and then it's five pull-ups, 10 push-ups, 15 squats. So how I have it broken down in week one, two, and three is a five minute AMRAP, seven minute AMRAP, 10 minute AMRAP.

But to truly do like a full Murph workout of this, it would be 20 minutes, right? And so we're not trying to squeeze in a full Murph workout on top of all these other reps. So just doing a quick five minute, seven minute, 10 minute, really isn't that bad overall. And I talked about on the podcast how like doing the Murph reps this way, you stay really fresh. You stay really fresh because you're doing that 160 meter run, which isn't a terrible distance. You're just doing five, 10, 15 real fast and then getting back to it. It's a really great way to get in.

you know, more volume, like this is like, wow, that's more volume specifically on stuff that we're already doing, right? We're doing pull-ups, push-ups and all these other things. But I haven't found it to be overly taxing. And that's why we start with lower AMRAPs, like a five minute AMRAP. That's not a lot of time. You're only going to get a handful of sets in on doing that. So it's not, if I was asking you to do 20 minute AMRAP every time you did this, that would be ridiculous. But starting with five minute AMRAP, this is just a quick, like high intensity interval type training thing. And then you're done.

All right, and then we'll go to workout C. Again, pull, push, and lower. We got chin-ups, ring push-ups, and either a Cossack squat or pistols based on your ability. And then for the chin-ups, it's 25, 50, 75 reps for week one, two, and three. Ring push-ups is 30, 60, 90. Cossack squats or pistols, 50, 75, 100. And then the conditioning is a 30-30 conditioning. So 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off.

⁓ for either 10, 15, or 20 minutes. That's week one, two, and three. And this is not meant to be a max effort, 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off. This is aerobic conditioning, kind of like a think zone two. This is more of zone two approach. But what you're wanting to do is take the 30 seconds to higher upper zone two, maybe even zone three, and then the rest, let your heart rate dip back down into zone two. The only real goal here is to not let your heart rate

get into zone one. That's the only real goal. So you can go higher if you want to go up to three or four, but that should only be temporarily and it should come back down to zone two, which isn't going to happen for most people in 30 seconds. So keeping it upper zone two, letting it fall down to lower zone two. And again, you're doing this at the end of a workout, so your bodies are already going to be primed and pumping blood. So it should be fairly easy to stay in zone two for that conditioning session. And I know that's kind of like a long explanation, took what, 20 minutes to talk about this program.

But I wanted to go over it because, you know, there is, there are a lot of athletes who need programs like this. And if you're like, I don't want to sit around and take notes, we're doing something really cool. As of this publishing, we are running a Black Friday special and we are selling this program. Okay, typically our programs minimum like 49 bucks, upwards more.

We're selling this specific program for 15 bucks. You get it for life, you get it in our app, and you will always have it. And so if you are interested in that, go to garagegymathlete.com and you can download it, or you can have it in the app permanently for 15 bucks. So it's not a $15 a month. It's nothing like that. It's 15 bucks one time, and then it's in that app and you have it forever. We're only doing this for Black Friday. So if you're listening to this after Black Friday, you should still be able to purchase the program, but it just won't be 15 bucks. It's going to be more than that. So if you're interested in being a part of our

what we actually call Better Human Friday sale, then go snag it. This is for all athletes, anybody. If you want this in your program permanently, go to garageroomathlete.com. You'll see all the ways that you can access that and you can have it in your portal permanently. So again, it's 15 bucks. like, you just gave me program for free. Why would I pay 15 bucks? You're really paying 15 bucks just for the access to the app, to be able to track things, interact with coaches. It's a very nominal fee to be able to like...

have this program for life and then also get a little bit of support behind it and an app to walk you through it.

Dave (21:01)
Yeah, with the app too, it's as simple as the tracking too. If you come back to it a year later, because this isn't a program a lot of people are going to be running nonstop necessarily, but maybe it's something you come back to once a year. Maybe you come back to it three years later when life gets busy and you can see all the higher performance trends over the years. It's really important for people to be able to see that.

Jerred (21:18)
Yeah. All right. Well, we covered most of it. mean, what do you think athletes should be like wrapping their heads around for Thanksgiving, all these things we have coming up, like being consistent, the challenges with food and everything else? Like, what are some things athletes should be keeping in mind in your opinion?

Dave (21:38)
I do want to get into that one. I guess one last clarifying question. Where do you program in something like this in a cycle? Because I think that's something high level for people that are following a more of a weight-based program. it like ditch the weight stuff for four weeks and do something like this? Or how do you zoom out high level of where someone programmed this in throughout the year within a current program they're doing?

Jerred (21:58)
Yeah, so if you are doing exactly how I just mentioned, those three exercises with the conditioning, this should be standalone, in my opinion. Again, it's only three days per week. Either you can just do three days per week. What I would do the other three days is conditioning. So I'd be doing running or something like that, jump rope, something along those lines. But if you just wanted to throw this into an existing program, what I would do is just select one, pull, one push, one lower, and add it to whatever

programming you're currently doing. So let's say you're in, you're doing our programming. You're doing the hard to kill track. You love it. You want to do, continue to do the hard to kill track. But strike zero sounds interesting. Just add strike zero pull ups to the end of that workout. Because it, it doesn't take a long time to do strike zero for one. And I talked about the fatigue, right? It's like, well, if you only do one, then it's 60 seconds. You're back to pull ups. This is where you could increase rest times and it would be perfectly fine. So increase that rest time up to two minutes.

or three minutes if you want. And it's just like, okay, do that max set of pull-ups, know, set your number and then go back down. What you'll feel in this workout is an insane pump is the first thing. Like, I'm not a guy who like chases the pump. That's not what I'm all about. But like when you're taking things to failure with body weight or just body weight training in general can feel very like, did I do anything? You know, and you will be really sore. Maybe the first week.

Two, if you're fairly untrained, but then it goes away completely and you're really just knocking stuff out. it's, like if anyone thinks that this program's insanely aggressive or like stupid because we're trained to failure so often, it's with your body weight. You know, we're not, I would never program something like this with a barbell. That would be stupidity. That would be an insanity. It'd be way too taxing on the central nervous system. But this is, it's just your body weight. And there are all these like parameters I put in place to make sure you're not doing too many reps. You're not like going to hurt yourself or push it too far. So you got to listen to the rules.

But yeah, you want to just like, I want to get better at pull ups, add strike zero once or twice a week to your existing program. It adds maybe 10 minutes to your overall program. And I will say that I finished all of that. I can't remember when the conditioning, in about 30 minutes. Not the conditioning element. think conditioning adds another 10 minutes or whatever. But yeah, the whole program can be done in 25 to 30 minutes.

Dave (24:10)
Yeah, I think that's all I got on clarifying some of that. me. Holiday stuff though, think, a big thing that comes to mind for me and what I've found personally over lot of the years, found working with a whole bunch of clients around, holidays is such a tricky time for like, what do I do? How do I work out? How do I eat? Should I enjoy myself? Should I not enjoy myself?

I think the consistent over perfection type mindset comes up a lot around around conversations like this. But I think I just hate seeing people completely coast, like start thinking about what you want 2026 to look like. you can choose like there are adults listening to podcast. You can choose whatever you want to do. But I've had excited for so many years, it would be like a start over mainly for me nutrition wise. Fitness is always something that and

If people are listening like me, it's like, okay, I can get my workouts in, like my nutrition got off the rails because there's all this different food around and all those things. So, but it's annoying when it's, if you have been there and you're like, okay, well I'm like five pounds of bloat or 10 pounds of bloat overweight from poor decisions. It's like, it's annoying starting the new year like that just takes away from momentum and those things. But I think for people, you know, deciding, deciding what that like, what that's going to look like for you over the holidays is probably the, you know, the most, most helpful thing of if you want to take time off from the gym, like

Take time off from the gym. If you enjoy working out on a holiday, like do that. Just don't do it to like earn more food or do those things. Like I think just, uh, you know, if you want to get moving, which I like doing on like Thanksgiving holidays is go for a run or do a body weight program like that. Or if you want to get a workout in the gym. But, uh, I think taking some of the pressure off of that and trying to just avoid the extremes either way of, some of that, feel like you have to do, like I have to stick to program exactly, or I'm just going to ignore it until January.

Jerred (25:56)
Yeah, man, think it was very interesting. was listening to this podcast with, you correct me on his last name. We were just talking about it before the podcast, Pavel, is it Tatsaline? Yeah, something like that. He's the kettlebell guy, right? He's like, you know, he's very knowledgeable. And I was listening to an older podcast with him and he was talking about some literature about rest and time off. And it was specific to type one and type two muscle fibers. And it was like,

you will develop more type one muscle fibers the more you train, which sounds counterintuitive, right? It's like, cause type two are the fast twitch, right? So, and those are the ones that you ultimately want. And he said, the more you train, the more consistent you are, your body just like, I don't know if it like, it grows accustomed to it, so it builds more type one muscle fibers. And that was very counterintuitive to me. And he said like, but the research says, if you take more time off,

your body is in that reactive mode and it starts to develop more type two muscle fibers in response to your training as opposed to the purely consistent I never take a day off. And that I so I've not looked at any of that research. So just he could have been making it up for all I know because I want to dive into that because it's very interesting to me because we all have this mentality of like I just want to be perfect all the time. I just want to train not miss any days. But he was making the case for taking

time periods off, maybe that's the end of the year, you take a week or two off, which, and honestly, I'm not going to lie, it would be really hard for me to just be like, you know, not going to train for two weeks. But he also like was making the case for deload weeks, which we program in garage to mouth, he's just baked in. So I've always thought deload was very intentional, or, you know, necessary, and has been intentional in our programming. So just thinking about that as well as like, maybe you're going into a deload phase for November and December where

your workouts are 30 minutes, you're doing half the volume, something like that. So stay consistent, but hit a lot less intensity, a lot less volume. Because the one thing I need mentally rolling into a new year is excitement. Whether that's in business, whether that's in life, personal goals, fitness, I want to be excited about what I'm about to tackle the next year. And I found the only real way for me to do that is to slow down. Like take a little bit of time off, do a little bit less.

like in training and business, like we're not trying to like crush goals the last month of the year, like let's just be a family and focus on that a little bit more. And that's helped me a ton in being able to be more present with my family around the holidays and then also be excited for the next year, again, with personal goals, training goals, everything else. that's huge for me. And I think a lot of other people kind of need that mentality adjustment. I know a lot of people just struggle being consistent, but there are some people who are like, you're almost too consistent to where, you know, it might be a detriment to your...

type two muscle fibers or just over your mentality and excitement rolling into the next year.

Dave (28:41)
And you think of like those dealing with feeling a little beat up from for those that are pushing train hard. It's like if your joints a little, little time to chill out. If you're dealing with overuse injuries, you don't want to like squeeze out the, I gotta get squeeze out the last part of this year. And then you come into the new year banged up and like that's, that's short, short, short term focus over, over what we can do longterm.

Jerred (29:02)
Yeah, and that's these days in general, Like everyone's like, not worried about the long-term effects of messing with your hormones or like taking these supplements or whatever, but hey, short-term you look great, feel good, so who cares? know, that's... All right, man, well, that's awesome. I'm glad we hit on that, but let's give some quick training and life updates and then we can get out of here, but how is life? How's training? I haven't checked in on your goal.

Dave (29:16)
Good for the

Jerred (29:28)
in a while. How's that going?

Dave (29:29)
Yeah, I still have to still to test it out trying to find a cause I want to do it at like with the hour, our time cap and I want to run the five K on a track. So it's finding there's a local school here that we can get access to that'll help do that. Cause I want.

5k to be on a track because I don't want to run it with some of the hills, not big hills, but I want it be as consistent as fast as possible. So I haven't actually tested out. The running is going really good. I mean, how accurate are these Garmin 5k predictors? It tells me I'm sub 20 on the predictor. I don't know how accurate it is.

Jerred (29:59)
I'm

always pissed at those, think it's too slow. Most of my running, I don't do a lot of fast running. My higher intensity training will be on a machine, like an air dyne or something. And so all my runs are only ever slow zone two stuff that I'm tracking with a Garmin. So they're like, oh, you're 5K, it's probably 28 minutes. I'm like, but not really. You're basing this off my zone two runs only. So I think if you're tracking everything and running a lot, it's probably pretty accurate. But if you're not, it...

Dave (30:27)
So.

Jerred (30:28)
It offends me frequently.

Dave (30:30)
Yeah, so I'm probably there right honestly with the with the running and I was talking on previous podcasts like I'm enjoying the running a lot more than I thought I would in terms of like I just enjoy it like I think and probably because coming from a lifting background it's like you know how slow the progress can be on if you're trying to.

add muscle or add strength for someone who's advanced. like that can take a long time, but you get, you add, you know, a small amount of weight over the course of a year and you're like stoked about it. But I think with running, having not done a lot of consistent running like this, aside from the ultra stuff, which was just literally logging time on feet. It's like, it's cool to see how fast your cardiovascular system responds. And I think that's where probably there's some excitement for someone who's been training for a long time that it's like, wow, that's, I can see progress really quickly like a newbie. So it's cool.

Jerred (31:14)
That is fun, the honeymoon phase of training in general. think, again, you gotta stay excited, right? You gotta stay excited about your training. That's awesome, Yeah, you're training for it, but you don't, you need that test, man. You're gonna be like so many months into it, it's like, might as well just go for the goal. Like, you don't even need a baseline anymore. Just like go, just go for it, see what happens. Awesome. ⁓ yeah.

Dave (31:27)
I know. Yeah, I'm just gonna go for it. Just send it. Snatch protocol.

Yeah. Do you wanna start with it? I'll share what I did too,

Jerred (31:42)
Yeah, let me get into what I've been playing around with first. like, I'll let some of the listeners know, you know, any of our true fans of Garage Jam Athlete, I'm toying around with the idea of a new track. I'm not going to release the name or what it's about, but, and I can't commit to it yet, but I want to talk about it the reason it has to do with my training is I've been talking about Strike Zero, I've been doing Cattlebell stuff. If people have been listening for a long time, they know it hurt my back and like I'm good now. And like there's just a lot of moving parts to why this new track might exist.

It's gonna exist. It's like what I'm doing these days and I want it's like hard to kill but with like different instruments. So anyway, I've been throwing around the kettlebell a lot. But what I don't like about a lot of kettlebell programs and I don't know what to call it man. Like I feel like true kettlebell athletes almost are like they're getting spiritual about it. know, like, do you know what I mean? It's like they're always barefoot and like shirtless and like doing some weird movements and stuff and like

I get it. And I agree with like, I like windmills, I like Turkish get ups, I see a lot of the value in those things, but I just saying like, I don't need to drink that much of the Kool-Aid to like, do the kettlebell, right? Like I actually want to look at the science behind the kettlebell. And there's a lot of science about it increasing your testosterone in certain protocols. We talked about it last week, increasing your VO2 max. And then what I've been playing around with and looking at lot of research on is over speed of centrics. So over speed of centrics is where

The easiest way to say it with a kettlebell is like you're doing a kettlebell swing and then you're bringing it down as fast as you can intentionally. So you're trying to bring a kettlebell down faster than gravity allows it to, right? Or faster than gravity would bring it down. And I've been playing with overspeed eccentrics and dude, my hamstrings have been so sore every time I do one of those because of the braking mechanism to stop that in the posterior chain, reverse it and then flip it back up. And that's why I was listening to some of Pavel's stuff because he's like the kettlebell guy. And he was saying,

he did a test with a 50 pound kettlebell and on a force plate and he was able to generate 10 G's of force on the kettlebell downward. So at the reverse angle of that, the switching, that's a 500 pound force on the muscles. It's a spike, right? It's not 500 pound deadlift or 500 pound squat where that tension is more continuous, but it's that that's just been so interesting and I've been interested in that idea for over a year.

And I've just because I can't there's not a lot of research on it. I know it's called over speed of Cintrix, but I don't have a lot of information on like how beneficial is this other than like being able to break with hamstrings. It's going to help with sprinting. It's going to make me a little bit faster, a little bit more athletic. But I've been diving more into that. And so there are a lot of interesting things I've been playing around with. And normally, if I play around with stuff long enough, it's got to come to the garage gym athlete community in a form of training. So that's what I've been working on a lot of that kind of stuff over the last few weeks. But ⁓

Yeah, that's kind of my update on training. Like that's what I've been playing around with and people will see when we start 2026. so we kind of a snatch test. We talked about it last week on the podcast. So 15 seconds on 15 seconds off for 20 minutes with I think I don't what we're using 30 ish somewhere. Thirty five. use a 35 as well. So this is the view to increase the view to max study from last week that we talked about. We both said we would do the workout. We both have done it.

Dave (34:48)
you

Jerred (34:58)
So yes, Dave, how was the workout for you?

Dave (35:01)
It was good. I hadn't done much kettlebell snatching before and I had, when I had done the kettlebell cert, I did the Strong First certification. was one that Pavel, I mean, I know he had started RKC and then he like branched off into Strong First, but that was, when I was doing a lot of snatches, I was probably back in, I mean, it's probably 2018 or something. And I've kept them in periodically, but not a lot of high volume stuff necessarily, but.

I enjoyed being back to it. The groove came back pretty quick on the movement at least, but I think the concern for someone maybe is like, yeah, like four, like the little bit of forearm beating that you get if your form's not dialed in for something like that. But I was surprised looking at like data versus how I felt, because my watch said I was, if you ask how I felt, like I didn't even really feel that winded until maybe I was breathing a little harder towards the end, but like I'd probably say RPE like.

Jerred (35:32)
Mm-hmm.

Dave (35:50)
five or six out of 10, like it felt pretty low, but my heart rate was consistently like 140s to low 150s, even with that. it didn't, it didn't, yeah. So didn't, the intensity maybe didn't get up quite as, quite as high, which I think could change with, and I know the protocol set up the way it was, but maybe a longer, longer work time, shorter rest time or heavier, heavier kettlebell, but heavier kettlebell might've been tough to get the seven, I was sitting right around seven reps each, each 15 second period. So I don't know.

Jerred (35:58)
That's zone 2, right? Like that's... Yeah.

Dave (36:20)
It might have slowed down if I tried going heavier with that. But I enjoyed it. Yeah, it was a fun set. I think the recovery cost is a lot lower than something like a run or something like that.

Jerred (36:30)
Well,

and that's why I think I talked about it last week is there's no magic in that actual protocol. The magic is in the oxygen demand and the oxygen debt that the workout creates. And so it sounds like, to be honest, you weren't getting there. So like you probably didn't see a lot of VO2 max improvements from that workout. More of you found a great way to do aerobic conditioning with a kettlebell, which I think is a win because a VO2 max workout should be closer to threshold, right? So, and I had all these same thoughts because I had a very similar experience to you.

is well one what I found with Garmin watches if that's how you're tracking your heart rate is when I'm swinging my arms around doing crazy stuff the tracking is off and so because it would say my heart rate was like 115 I wear my watch on my left hand after I did left-handed kettlebell snatches for 15 seconds it would say my heart rate's like 115 and then like I would very intentionally like kind of hold the watch on my wrist and like and then it would it's like shooting up and I'm like yeah you're not

you're not tracking it 100%. So maybe a chest strap too to make it better. But you also said your RPE wasn't all the way up there. And so that's the same kind of track with me. So it was 20 minutes. The first 15 minutes, I think I was in zone two. And then the last five minutes, I started to hit zone three and high zone three. And what I did intentionally, because I just was a little bit frustrated with the lower heart rate, is I was doing seven reps per minute too. I increased it to nine.

Already fatigued for the last five minutes and that did bump the heart rate over and nine nine was harder to squeeze in nine was like The timer was beeping for me to switch arms at nine reps every time So I was just barely able to get it in and so my adjustments if I had to turn this into more of vo2 max workout because if you think about it this that study was done on division one female athletes soccer players Who probably aren't doing a ton of weightlifting so they are incredibly conditioned

but they're probably not doing as much weightlifting as we are. So for us, it was not an overly taxing workout. So how could we adjust it? What I wouldn't do is increase my weight because I did the math. I don't know if I screwed it up, but it's like 280 reps. If you're doing seven reps per minute for that whole time, like nearly 300 kettlebell snatches in 20 minutes. Like you need to know what you're doing. You need to have really good form. So anyone out there who's thinking about trying it, that's a lot of reps.

I felt fine. wasn't really sore after I was surprised because that was a lot of reps. But I wouldn't go up because I think a 50 pound kettlebell would wreck me like at 300 reps in 20 minutes or close to it. So yeah, I would increase a reps per set first. So in that same 15 seconds going up to nine for the duration and seeing what that does. My guess is if I started there, I probably would have slowly crept into zone three about a third to halfway in and then my heart rate would have increased further.

Or like you're saying, let's do 30 seconds on, 30 seconds on, or 30 seconds on, 15 seconds off. And just see how that changes things. Because like I said, the magic is in the oxygen debt and demand is not necessarily in the protocol itself. So I was thinking about this all week because I was like, I don't think that was a VO2 max increasing workout, how it was executed. And the only way to do that is to increase or decrease something. Decrease rest times, increase weight or reps. And I'm not doing the weight, so.

really leaves us with two options.

Dave (39:45)
And I think I'd be trying again with like some heavier swings or something like would maybe like if I was gonna go wanted to go heavier or something I think swing would be a good movement you'd be able to get more reps in and those things and it's a little friendlier for some people on like shoulders and like if you're not as familiar with the kettlebell snatch that is a lot of reps swings tends to be a safer movement whether you do one arm or two arm like it just takes out some of the complexity of it for because I'd worked on that movement like technique like pretty intensively over the course of

you know, 12 months back in a while ago. So it's felt pretty comfortable with it, but I can see how that'd be hard for someone that isn't familiar with that.

Jerred (40:15)
Yeah.

Yeah, and if you're looking for an easier way to do this, I've also been playing around with that protocol specifically with jump rope and 30 seconds on 30 seconds off of double unders for even 10 minutes does get me to zone four. So that's just a big difference, right? It's like a, now I will say the first time I did that workout, my calves were incredibly sore and so were my feet. But I've also done a lot of jump rope over the years. So it's like not normally hard for me to get back to a place where I can do that workout a couple of times a week.

But I do think that that 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, that one to one, trying to get that higher heart rate, there's something to that. If you want to try it on a rower first, a bike or running or jump rope, go for it. I'd say try it there before you do kettlebell snatch if you don't have a lot of experience with the kettlebell snatch. That's a down, I wouldn't program that. Like for our athletes, that's one of the, there's some things where I'm toeing the line of stupid and like 300 reps of a kettlebell snatch for somebody who doesn't have lot of experience with kettlebell snatch, like.

You're in that stupidity zone, in my opinion.

Dave (41:20)
That's what I was trying to make clear, because I know some people, it's like, oh, cool, I'll just go try it out. And then you wreck your shoulder or something for a try. Yeah. Yeah, science. .

Jerred (41:22)
You

You're wrecked. it's like, hey, it's not my fault. This is what the science said. I'm not saying like, so we tried it out. We told you we would. We reported back. We recommend most people not do it

unless you have a lot of experience and like how the adjustments we would make for our own personal training. All right. Well, I think that one wraps this one up. Look, we are doing our Better Human Friday special right now. So go to garagegymathlete.com. There'll be a big banner at the top of the website.

You can click on that. It'll take you to all the deals that we're running because the strike zero program is only one of like over a dozen deals we have going on. You can get pro long garage gym athlete memberships at a discount. We're selling garage gym athlete banner which should be in every garage gym on the planet for a huge discount. We have a number of other programs in there. So go check it out. There's a lot of different stuff that you can get access to at some pretty phenomenal discounts that are incredibly helpful helps build better humans and will make you a better athlete. So go check that out.

For all of our athletes sticking around, know, we got a lot of great stuff coming for you in 2026 and it's going to be awesome. And I can't wait to start talking more about those things as we close out 2025 and are headed into the new year. But that's it for this one. Remember, if you don't kill comfort, comfort will kill you.