a) All swans are white

b) Running a mile every day will make you lean

Smart readers might have read statement b) and immediately started devising an experiment to test it: obviously you’d have to control for calorie intake and other daily activity, right? Smarter readers, of course, will have already realized that it’s very hard (maybe impossible) to definitely prove either statement: but it’s very easy to disprove them. Find one black swan, and statement a) is done: find one fat guy who runs a mile a day, and b) is provably wrong.

This is what philosopher Karl Popper called falsifiability, a cornerstone of the scientific method and the key to what’s known as critical rationalism. A theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, argues Popper, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by experiments – and that if the outcome of an experiment contradicts the theory, one should refrain from manoeuvres that evade the contradiction merely by making it less falsifiable. Look at evolution, for instance: up until the 19th century, a lot of people still believed that the world was created 6,000 years ago. The fossil record and carbon dating seemed to disprove that idea, but then a naturalist called Philip Henry Gosse published a book arguing that God had deliberately created lots of fossils to give the illusion that the Earth was older than it is. The problem: this makes creationism invulnerable to failure, since there’s no way to falsify it: if the answer to any new piece of evidence is ‘God is fucking with you,’ then creationism doesn’t even qualify as a theory.

So how does this relate to getting jacked?

Simple. There are a thousand fitness programmes in the world, each of them claiming to be The Thing that will get you to an effortless six-pack, or rippling delts, or a triple-bodyweight deadlift, or a 3-hour marathon on less than two hours of training a week: and a lot of them don’t work. Paying attention to the people selling them, or to the success stories they cite, is pretty much useless: those people have a vested interest in stacking the evidence in their favour, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell if the dude selling you his three-minute fat-blaster really got lean with the workout he’s touting, or with years of good eating and better genetics. Listening to success stories from other people who’ve done The Thing might not work, because you can find success stories for anything, and people are more likely to report success than failure. Even listening to an appeal to the scientific validity of the idea is questionable: the human body is an insanely complicated thing, and the our understanding of the mechanisms by which it works is constantly being refined. Or, to put it another way: it doesn’t matter whether a training plan should work, according to our current understanding of science: what matters is whether it actually fucking works.

So here’s the question to ask when you’re considering a new training plan:

Can you find anyone who’s done The Thing who hasn’t got the results you’re looking for?

Suddenly, your training plan is falsifiable.

Take Starting Strength, for instance. I would be amazed if there’s anyone in the world who did that plan seriously, as described, and (assuming they were a beginner) didn’t put at least 30kg on their deadlift and back squat, and a couple of kilos of muscle on their body. Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 is similar: I’m the sort of man who hangs out on weightlifting forums, and I’ve never seen a single guy go ‘Actually, it didn’t put any weight on any of my lifts.’ By contrast, think about the premise that running will make you lean: that’s instantly disproved any time you spectate at a running-based event. P90x, 10,000 kettlebell swings in a month, Ido Portal’s online training plan, CrossFit Endurance: will they work for you? If you can’t find anyone they haven’t worked for, there’s a good chance the answer’s yes.

Obviously, you’re going to argue with this.

Firstly, okay, there’s potential for a bit of correlation/causation confusion here. For instance, I would argue that any man who can do 20 strict pullups will almost certainly have a six-pack. But is that because doing all those pullups makes you ripped, or because any guy who can do 20 pullups will, ipso facto, have very low bodyfat in the first place? Realistically, it’s probably a bit of both, but if the pattern’s well-established then you might not even need to worry about it: just concentrate on getting those 20 pullups, one way or another, and the six-pack will come (obviously, there are a lot of ways to do this quicker, but for the sake of argument). [Incidentally, this is one reason I like setting performance goals rather than bodycomp ones: weirdly, I find it much easier to eat less cake when the end goal is ‘Do more pullups’ than when it’s ‘get lean’ – but the beauty is, you get the body comp stuff as a bonus.]

Secondly, there are a few things that confound this process: starting conditions, commitment to the process, etc. So yes, you do have to think about those. But honestly, if you’re committing to a new plan for at least six weeks (you are committing to at least six weeks, right?) then you should think about it quite a lot first anyway. Here’s my five-step guide to making it happen.

1. Pick The Thing you’re going to try. The more simple and clearly-defined the easier it’ll be to test: ‘Do 100 pressups a day’ is clear, as is ‘follow Starting Strength exactly as described.’ ‘Do CrossFit’ is vague – ‘Follow the CrossFit mainsite WODs’ would be an improvement.
2. Define the results you want. If your plan is ‘Do 100 pressups a day’, then ‘Be able to do more pressups’ is fine. But if your end goal is ‘Get a massive chest,’ then be honest with yourself decide that now.
3. Try to find someone who’s done The Thing who hasn’t got the results you’re looking for. Post on Twitter, or Facebook, or (better) Reddit’s /r/fitness or /r/weightroom or /r/bodyweightfitness forums. If your response to this is ‘I can hardly find anyone who’s done the thing,’ then maybe this is an early warning sign that you’ve chosen the wrong Thing: there is very little stuff that actually works that isn’t already in widespread use. Stop looking for the super-special shit that nobody else knows about: start looking for the well-established stuff that works for everyone who does it.
4. Pay attention to what the ‘did not work’ people say. If they’re post-rationalizing their own failure by going ‘Ah, but I didn’t try hard enough/got injured/ate wrong,’ then be honest: will you do better? If, for instance, a programme has a 50/50 chance of making you look like He-Man or blowing out your rotator cuffs, then maybe that’s not a programme worth gambling your one set of working shoulders on. If everyone says the programme only works if you’re genuinely going to drink a gallon of milk a day or squat five times a week (or whatever), then ask yourself: are you actually going to do that?
5. Repeat until you’ve found a plan that you can’t falsify. And have at it.

Science is beautiful for a reason. Here’s some Popper to close us out:

“A rationalist is simply someone for whom it is more important to learn than to be proved right; someone who is willing to learn from others — not by simply taking over another’s opinions, but by gladly allowing others to criticize his ideas and by gladly criticizing the ideas of others … The genuine rationalist does not think that he or anyone else is in possession of the truth; nor does he think that mere criticism as such helps us achieve new ideas. But he does think that, in the sphere of ideas, only critical discussion can help us sort the wheat from the chaff. He is well aware that acceptance or rejection of an idea is never a purely rational matter; but he thinks that only critical discussion can give us the maturity to see an idea from more and more sides and to make a correct judgement of it.”

Damn straight. Live hard!

Minute one: do one burpee (let’s get the terminology right: this means chest to the floor at the bottom, get up however you can. The pressup doesn’t need to be strict). Rest for the rest of the minute.

Minute two: do two burpees. Rest for the rest of the minute.

Repeat until failure/collapse.

It’s a format with good points and bad points. ‘Good’ is that you tend to get quite a bit of volume in, because the numbers go up in what’s known as a triangular series, where the last round you hit, n, means you’ve got: n(n+1)/2 reps. Getting to the round of 12 means you’ve done 78 reps, for instance, which is pretty good going. Bonus: you probably don’t need much warmup, because the early reps will get that done. And the best bit is that, if you choose your exercises properly, it always descends into the kind of unrelenting horror where each round becomes a choice between quitting and somehow getting through it, knowing that the next round is going to be even worse. After all, intentionally putting yourself through certain sorts of horrible things is good preparation for life.

The ‘bad’ is that this doesn’t work with everything. Death by pullups, for instance, is a CrossFit staple, but if you aren’t going to do kipping pullups (and there are good reasons not to) then your muscles will fail before your conditioning/heart, which isn’t much of a good test of anything. So death by burpees is great: death by bench press isn’t. Do a Death By workout today: they’re good, kit-free fun.

Still here? Bad news. Inevitably, there is an even worse way to do this.

Once you’ve got the hang of Death By Burpees, the much, much nastier option is this triple-header, devised by Michael Blevins.

Death By Triple Threat

(for each exercise, do 1 on the first minute, 2 on the 2nd minute etc, until you can’t get the required reps in a minute)

ROUND 1: Death By Burpee Pullups (chest to bar)

When you fail, on the next minute go straight into:

ROUND 2: Death By Burpee Box jump (start again at 1)

When you fail, on the next minute go to:

ROUND 3: Death By Burpee (start again at 1)

The ‘good’ thing about this is that it gives you three chances to fail, and some time to recover between them. It’ll keep your heart rate high and test how much you want to carry on, because it only gets worse as you tire. ‘Some people finish this and go ‘Oh, I didn’t really do much work there,’ says Blevins. ‘I’ll go: that’s because you quit.’

To give you an idea of what not quitting would be like, this should go something like 40 minutes long: 11 reps of round one and two, maybe 18 reps of round three. That’s 303 burpees and a lot of unpleasantness.
Death by Burpees. Get to it: and please don’t actually die.

5. Most people aren’t judging you

One of the most common fears among – well, anyone – is that they’re being constantly judged or made fun of by people around them. ‘This is half right,’ points out Neil Strauss, author of The Game. ‘People may notice you, but most of them are too busy worrying about what people are thinking of them to judge you. Once you realise that most people are just like you, you’ll start to become socially fearless.’ PUAs ‘learn’ this by relentlessly approaching groups of girls – you can do it more easily. From now on, when you’re worried about people judging you, just think about how infrequently you worry about what anyone else is doing. That ought to fix it.

4. Some people are just naturally better at X – but that doesn’t matter

Let’s not get into a nature/nurture thing and just accept that, yes, some people seem ‘naturally’ better at talking to members of the opposite sex, just like some people are ‘naturally’ more confident in job interviews, presentations, or BAFTA acceptance ceremonies, or ‘naturally’ better at maths, running fast, or kicking a ball into a net. Maybe they are. But that doesn’t matter, because if you aren’t ‘naturally’ talented, it’s not about who you are – it’s just about what you do and how you present yourself. Fix that – even if you have to fake it at first – and soon (well, at some point) you’ll have people envying your ‘natural’ talent. At this point, you can charge them two thousand pounds for a seminar, or break the cycle by, y’know, acting like an actual human.

3. ‘Being yourself’ is overrated

You’ve been told by dozens of films, cartoon animals and bitter X-Factor exit interviews that ‘being yourself’ is the highest ideal you can aspire to – but is it, really? Yes, it’s great if you’ve got a strong sense of who you are, what your strengths and values are, and how to convey them effectively – but no, it isn’t, if you’re using it as an excuse not to improve. Or, as Strauss has it: ‘What most of us present to the world isn’t necessarily our true self: it’s a combination of years of bad habits and fear-based behaviour. Our real self lies buried underneath all the insecurities and inhibitions. So rather than ‘being yourself’, focus on discovering and permanently bringing to the surface your best self.’ Seems legit.

2. Outcomes aren’t everything

Yes, it’s possible to be too outcome-focused. Life is unpredictable: even if you do everything exactly right, you aren’t always going to get exactly what you want: whether that’s a phone number, a date, a marriage, a specific job, a six-pack or a book deal. Being too outcome-focused, as most PUAs learn, can turn into a form of self-sabotage. Instead, emotionally detaching from the outcome – while taking rational steps towards smaller goals – can keep you focused. It’ll happen sooner or later – the important thing is doing everything you can to get the process right, and not beating yourself up over missteps.

1. ‘Inner game’ is better than ‘game’

At some point, all ‘PUAs’ make a distinction between ‘outer game’ – ie all the pre-prepared lines, routines, magic tricks and general bullshit that most ‘gurus’ teach – and ‘inner game’, which is basically shorthand for ‘being a slightly better person.’ Ultimately, the theory goes, confidence is difficult to fake, and so becoming genuinely more adventurous, curious, sociable and confident is much, much better than pretending. Instead of faking it until you make it, the idea goes, fake it until you become it – an idea which, like all the ones above, goes far, far beyond hitting on ladies in bars.

From time to time, someone devises a videogame that promises to get you in shape. They almost always fail. This happens for a number of reasons:

• If it’s a game based entirely around exercise, the moves tend to be too entry-level to do any good. This is the problem with WiiFit.
• If it’s a game based on cardio kit – the Tour De France simulators you see in your gym, for instance – the graphics and gameplay won’t be nearly as high-end as what you’ll see in ‘proper’, modern, triple-A games, so everything’s tinged with the smell of ‘budget’ and the game probably won’t be much good.
• If someone devises an accessory designed to link to existing games – the most common is an exercise bike that you have to pedal to go faster in driving sims – all it does is actively make the game less fun to play.

The solution? Simple. Keep playing the videogames you already like playing. Just tweak the experience so that it gets you fitter. How? Here’s how.

Beginner difficulty: Sit on the floor

Yes, it’s as simple as that. I’ve stolen this from Dan John, who likes to tell people that they can watch as much TV as they like – but only if they’re on the floor. The secret? It’s virtually impossible for a grown adult human to find one comfortable spot on the floor – as opposed to, say, burrowing into a cocoon on the couch – and so doing this means you’ll roll around, move your hips, and generally make up for some of the time you already spend sitting at your desk.

Normal difficulty: Play standing up

Why do you have to sit down anyway? When you sit, your metabolism slows, connective tissues tighten, muscles shut off and circulation’s constricted. Standing burns roughly 1.36 calories a minute more than sitting. And according to the nice people at Precision Nutrition: “Uninterrupted sedentary time is strongly associated with cardio-metabolic and inflammatory risk biomarkers” — regardless of age, gender or ethnicity.” To combat this, more and more people are turning to standing desks – but if that isn’t an option, whether because of office politics or workplace derision, stand up while you play games. Not the likes of The Last Of Us, obviously – you probably want to concentrate on that – but if you’re logging in for, say, a three-hour stint of CoD online, why not stand? There’s even evidence that standing improves cognitive function, so you might finally get a big enough killstreak to use the tactical nuke.

Advanced difficulty: Play for press-ups

I’ve got this one from Gym Jones’ Rob MacDonald, who once told me that he and his son do 10 pressups every time they die while playing God Of War. Oh, and did I mention that they play on the ‘Titan’ difficulty setting? In case you aren’t familiar with God Of War, please let me assure you – that is a fuckload of pressups. What I suggest for you, dear reader, is that you set a press-up penalty for death depending on how many times you’re likely to die.  In solo GTA V, where deaths are few and far between but loading pauses are long, you’ve probably got time for a max set every time you get Wasted. In two-player Street Fighter Ultra, it’s simple: the loser does 10 (winner’s choice of style, natch). If you’re already hunched over from hours of sitting at a desk, get a band and do pull-aparts instead. Don’t just sit there watching the screen.

Mega difficulty: Play in a squat

Kelly Starrett, creator of Mobility WOD, suggests that you should try to ‘accumulate’ 10 minutes of squat time a day – details here. The problem? Sitting in a squat is tedious and – in the early going – painful. The solution: get your ten minutes while you play Resogun or Bulletstorm, and thank me when you feel spritelier and look awesome. You’re welcome.

HOMEWORK: Do one of these – or all of these – this week. Don’t play games? Do them while watching TV. Don’t watch TV? Well, aren’t you just the best – do them while reading instead. Don’t read books? GET OFF MY WEBSITE. And live hard!

What do power metal guitar, Wing Chun and Brazilian jiu-jitsu have in common? That’s a question not many people are qualified to answer – apart from Herman Li. Li is one of two lead guitarists for Dragonforce, the British band who exploded into popular culture when their most insanely solo-packed song, Through The Fire And The Flames, appeared in Guitar Hero 3. They’ve just released their sixth studio album – in which Li’s style continues to evolve, even though he’s constantly touring, producing, and learning martial arts. Herman Li, in other words, lives hard. So when my good friend Lorenzo Fraquelli, founder-owner of Chiswick BJJ, said he was teaching him, I asked if we could have a chat. And we did – about flow, the 10,000 rule, and why you should learn to talk to people, among other things…

Live Hard: Okay Herman – so if I’ve got this right, you practise Wing Chun, judo and BJJ, you’re a producer, you’re in a successful band, and you are insanely good at guitar. How do you have time?

Herman Li: Well, the short answer is that it’s better to do all that than spend time watching most programmes on TV or reading other people’s Facebook streams. You’ve got to remember that we live to do things. If you can turn something you do to relax or for enjoyment into something where you learn or improve…that’s key, that’s kind of the way I see the whole thing.

What’s a typical day like for you at the moment?

Well, there’s no such thing as typical, but for the last ten days I’ve been rehearsing. I get up, spend an hour doing whatever, then play the guitar for four, five six hours…have an hours’ break and then do another two or three hours. That’s not totally typical, but that’s what I’m doing right now.

Are you familiar with the idea of the 10,000 hour rule?

No, not really.

It’s this idea that anyone who puts a certain amount of disciplined practice into any technical field can become an expert in that field, and that it’s basically impossible to become an expert *without* a certain amount of practise. The 10,000 hours bit is slightly discredited, though.

Well, I think that hard work is better than talent, absolutely. Talent, I think, can make you lazy, because you learn really quickly. I feel like…I always say that I’m not that great a guitar player, anyone can do this if they spend the time on it. To be honest, I think anyone can do pretty much anything these days – with the knowledge, the information that’s out there on the internet, you don’t have to rely on people for a lot of things any more. In everything from martial arts to cooking, I’ve learned that it’s better when you don’t have to rely on someone else – you can find that knowledge and deal with the problem yourself.

Another idea that’s popular at the moment is the idea of ‘deliberate practice’ – concentrating hard on every moment you learn, and pushing outside your comfort zone. How does that square with your experience?

Well, for me, when it comes to learning something new, I’m not just disciplined, I’m a perfectionist. I don’t half-learn techniques. I certainly think you can get to a certain level without doing that, but to really push into the higher levels of something, you need to invest the time, you need the hours – beyond what you’re already doing. To get to a decent level might take ten hours, but to get to a really good level might take 100. The curve can steepen really suddenly, and you’ve got to be ready for that.

So how do you stay motivated when even tiny improvements take dozens of hours of practice?

Fortunately, there are so many great musicians doing something different from me. Music’s not a competition, which is great because there’s no loser – there’s only winning. But it does make you go ‘Oh, I want to get better.’ Seeing people doing different things from you should motivate you to be constantly evolving, to never stop learning.

What do you think the things that successful, productive people have in common are?

I think most successful people do their own thing. So nobody copies each other so much. I think Dragonforce have a unique sound, and that comes from doing our own thing. You have to learn to learn to teach yourself and you have to learn to process information, because there comes a point where you can’t succeed simply using things you’ve been taught. Everyone who teaches comes in with preconceived rules, and you need to find out what works for you.

Having said what I said about Facebook earlier, I think one thing that some very technical people can neglect is the social side of things. You’ve got two extremes. You’ve got the guy who obsesses over what he wants to be good at, and doesn’t bother learning social skills whatsoever. I admire anyone who can do that. But then you’ve got people who are really good at talking to people. You see that a lot of time in different jobs – you’ve got the guy at the top who’s really good at talking to people but has no technical skills, and everyone under him’s going ‘Oh wow, what an arsehole.’ But to be honest, you have to learn both skills – to some extent, you’re going to have to dilute one with the other. I did my time going ‘I don’t care about socialising, I need to learn the guitar,’ but then the other stuff came later, when I was touring and going all around the world, talking to people. You have to be able to talk to people, whatever your job is.

It’s interesting that you say that. I made a conscious decision to get better at talking to people when I was in my 20s, and I feel like it improved my life in a lot of ways – in learning, not just socially…

Yes, exactly. And to some extent, it’s like learning a different language – within one language, you have to learn to interact with logical people, with emotional people, how to deal with different types of people. And then, once you start teaching some kind of art, that’s what really tests your ability to do that.

Speaking of different arts, let’s talk about fighting. How did you get into that?

The science of it is what attracts me. It’s about physical, kinetic energy, how the body moves. Obviously I watched Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies when I was young and I was like ‘Oh, that’s badass, I want to be able to move like that.’ But later on, when you study it, you find that there’s such amazing science to it. When I was a kid in Hong Kong my parents thought fighitng was for thugs, they didn’t see the artistic side of it.

As far as BJJ goes, started with Lorenzo [Fraquelli] when we were both white belts, now he’s a black belt and I’m still blue. I need to keep moving to get to that extra level.

Do you find time to practice on tour?

Yeah, a few years ago I had a sound guy on the tour who was a kung fu guy, but also did wrestling, and my drum tech guy did kickboxing and MMA, so I had mats and we’d train kickboxing, jiu-jitsu, all that. For some reason, no-one in other bands was doing that at the time, but now I go on tour and lots of people are doing it. Matt Heafy from Trivium just got his blue belt. He’s only been training for a year but he’s been insane about it, he’s got the jiu-jitsu bug where you do it every day. Zoltan from Five Finger Death Punch trains too, he’s a black belt judoka. The first time he trained jiu-jitsu was with me on tour, and now he brings black belts with him on tour to train with. I’m not quite as serious as that yet, but it would be cool.

Do you think that being an expert in one field – guitar, say – helps you master the learning process you need for another?

Well, when I started BJJ I was getting choked out left and right and throwing up, which isn’t really a problem in guitar. But really it’s the mentality and the discipline – you already know how to learn, and that discipline plays a huge part in it. When I was first learning Wing Chun, they were obsessive about details – they’d yell at you when a hand was out of place. And that’s got a lot in common with the way I practice guitar, where I’m looking to be technically perfect at everything. You learn to break things down, to visualise and apply, to re-apply. You train your brain to learn, you train yourself to absorb techniques.

And do you actually enjoy it all? One thing that goes slightly against the ‘deliberate practise’ mantra is the idea of ‘flow’ – that actually, trying to find a practise state that feels fun and effortless is the key to fast progress. What are your thoughts on that?

Pretty much with everything I do I feel like the hours just disappear off the planet. It’s a great zone to be in because you’re not aware of the future, the past, you’re focused. But not everything can be fun, unfortunately. It’s like if you’re doing conditioning for martial arts – I don’t think anyone enjoys that. And certain techniques for the guitar are like that – when you’re learning them for the first time, there’s no fun in it. It’s only once you’ve learned them that the fun can really start.

Herman, it’s been a pleasure, and the album is awesome. Thanks very much. 

No problem, thanks for some interesting questions. Hopefully I’ll see you at the gym.

HOMEWORK: Listen to new Dragonforce album Maximum Overload, out today. And re-read How To Talk To Armed Policemen: because talking to people is an essential life skill. Herman Li says so.

Just so it doesn’t seem like I’m picking on Crossfit, I should mention that I don’t think there are any other decent all-round tests of fitness elsewhere, either. The NFL Combine gets no respect even among NFL players – it’s really a question of how well you can game a system that doesn’t really test any qualities you need in the NFL. Powerlifting tests how strong you are, but also your technique in two highly technique-dependent lifts (and the deadlift). Marathons are a great test of how fast you can run a distance you’ll probably never need to run, Olympic lifting tests how well you can manoeuvre a lovely straight bar around your body, and I quite like strongman comps but there’s no denying that you can win one while still looking (and wheezing) like a circus fatman.

Now to the point. I got angry about this to the point of going ‘Well, what do I do if I don’t want to spend my life doing handstands?’ And my friend Pieter Vodden, fully certified Gym Jones disciple and all-round badass, replied:

‘There’s always barber college.’ 

At this point, angels sang.

If you don’t get the reference, it’s a quote from Roadhouse, one of the finest films in Patrick Swayze’s career. And that was all it took for me to have two separate-but-related revelations, one after another. First:

I could make my own fitness challenge. 

Then:

It should be a tribute to Patrick Swayze. 

Why Patrick Swayze? Because he lived hard. His dad was a rodeo champ, and his mother was a dance teacher. He was offered dance and athletic scholarships when he went to college, and learned to skydive for real when he made Point Break. He did gymnastics, and he could surf, and fight. He was, apparently, a nice guy. He was awesome.

True, the Barber College Challenge doesn’t have crowds, or prize money, or plaudits for the winner, but who gives a shit about any of that? The point of a fitness competition is to test your fitness, and let you improve it. And so here we are. And the rules are simple:

1. You have to do all the below tests over the course of a weekend. The order doesn’t matter, and you can do them all back to back, or spread them out. Just get them done. And since the point is to test for weaknesses, you should probably do them this weekend. Don’t train for this: it’s supposed to be a reflection of how your training has prepared you for life, not how well you can prepare for a set of tests.

2. The Barber College Challenge works on the honour system. Yes, you can use RunKeeper or your camera or whatever to document your scores – and that’s what I’ll be doing – but you don’t have to. Again: this is about improving your life, not showing off.

3. There are only two rules. Cool? Cool. Onto the challenge!

BUY-IN: Diving forward roll over something.

Aha! Maybe you’re already out! But you shouldn’t be. Swayze could definitely do a forward roll. Everyone should be able to do a forward roll – and if you can’t, congratulations, you just discovered a weakness that you can improve instantly. I chose a Reebok step to dive over, but you can go smaller or bigger if you like. Try a shoe! A water bottle! A picnic table! And if you can’t do one, work on it.

Now: the actual events. I’m not posting standards for these, because, really, there are lots of reasons why you’d be better or worse at some of them, and I don’t want anyone getting discouraged. Remember: the only failure is not caring how good you are at any of these things.

Event 1: 1 mile run for time

Fundamental, even if you don’t have to flee from Johnny Utah: your cardio should be up to this, and it’s not like you’re going to row away from a mugger. Do it outside if you can, and preferably on a loop so that the elevation gain/loss is equal. If you’re doing it on a treadmill, honour demands that you set it to  If you’re a big guy, I can only apologise, but I’ll make it up to you on…

Event 2: Overhead press 1RM

The most Swayze-endorsed of all the events. Anyone who says they’ve never wanted to recreate the final scene from Dirty Dancing is a goddamned liar, and this is the closest you’ll get in the gym. Well, technically a push-press would be closer to the actual dance move – but going heavy on those gets a bit sketchy form-wise. So here you are: no leg drive, just a strict press overhead with a barbell. Better than a bench press, because it tests your core and stability. Yes, you need a gym for this, but you can probably get a day-pass from somewhere. Non-gym workout regime hasn’t prepared you for this? Do more handstand press-ups.

Event 3: Max pull-ups

Because Roadhouse-Swayze didn’t get in throat-ripping shape with curls. The rules are simple: straight arms at the bottom, whole head goes over the bar at the top, your attempt ends when you fall off the bar, and you should use absolutely minimal amounts of kicking. Yes, you’re going to wiggle your legs a bit if you go for a proper max, but no ‘kipping.’ You’ll know in your heart whether you do this properly or not. And Swayze knows too. 

 Event 4: Max press-ups

Honestly, I’d rather this was an all-out-effort on a Sonic Blast Man punch-machine, but they’re a bit of an endangered species these days. Instead, do these, strict: chest touches the floor at the bottom of the rep, arms are straight at the top. You can ‘rest’ in downward/upward dog, but as soon as any part of your body touches the floor except for your hands, toes and chest, the attempt is over. As much as anything, this will let you know if you’ve been slacking at the gym – almost anyone can do pressups almost anywhere, so if you’re terrible at them it’s essentially because you don’t do them enough. And when the lactate builds up, remember: pain don’t hurt.

Extra credit: BE NICE

Oh yes. It’s a key part of Roadhouse Swayze’s credo, and an essential part of life. I’ll leave it to you to decide what this means – perhaps you’ll help an aging couple with their gardening, or bring the concept of caffé sospeso to your local coffee shop. Perhaps you’ll spend the weekend working on your empathy…or perhaps you’ll skip the last part of the challenge entirely. If it’s the last one, please consider what Dalton would think of you.

HOMEWORK: Do the challenge! And remember: it’s not what score you get, it’s what that score tells you about your weaknesses and strengths. Post scores, thoughts and results in the comments (or via the Contact form if you’re shy). Either way, know that if you give it your all, Swayze would be proud.

UPDATE: Thanks to a few kind people who’ve contacted me since this went live, the winner will actually get a pretty sweet prize package, including goodies that I’ll mention in the follow-up to this. GET SWAYZE-ING.

Not uncommon.

If you spend any time at all on the internet, you’ve seen those ‘one weird trick’ ads flashing away at the side of…whatever it is that you spend your time on. They’re usually for fat loss, skin care or making money, with the promise that lawyers, dermatologists and liposuction clinics will hate you afterwards. Do they work? I don’t know, I’ve never clicked one. 

Here’s something that will work:

Drink a gallon of water a day. 

This is one of those health tips that everyone dismisses as ‘obvious.’ Yeah, we’re all dehydrated. Yes, we should drink more water. Now shut up, I’m browsing for a new training programme. 

What finally got me to take this seriously was that UFC fighter Joe Lauzon, a guy who (I hope he wouldn’t mind me saying) has made the most of his genetics with extremely smart training, got his entire gym to start drinking a gallon of water a day for the month of July. Cue stories of improved skin, better mental focus, fat loss, energy, etc etc etc. Also: it’s free. So I decided to give it a go. I’ll talk about results in a minute. First, the obvious question:

How do you drink a gallon of water a day?

Yes, this is the most frequent question I’ve been asked, and yes, it’s legitimate. After all, I – and most people – have been vaguely thinking about drinking more water for years. And so while the annoying answer would be to say ‘With your mouth, dumbass’, I will instead take the high road and give you the exact system that’s worked for me. You can follow it if you want, but you certainly don’t have to. Here goes:

1. Get at least one, and preferably two, containers that hold roughly a pint of water – one for home and one for work. This does not mean getting two pint glasses – it just means measuring whatever glasses/jugs/protein shakers at your disposal already fit a pint. Some people recommend getting a gallon jug and carrying it around – I don’t. Apart from being inconvenient and heavy – and making you into ‘that guy who carries around the water jug’ – it makes drinking the whole thing seem depressing and unmanageable. 

2. Resolve to drink eight of those containers a day. You can drink anything else you like, including more water – but it doesn’t count. If you’re anything like me, you probably go ‘Well, I drink a lot of green tea, that’s hydrating, and I sometimes drink from the water fountain or have a sparkling water when I eat out, so…’ None of that counts. It’s too easy to overestimate your consumption, and too difficult to calculate. Just think about those eight containers. 

3. Space it out. For most people, this is the revelation. A gallon of water is an insane amount, but eight pints of water is easy. Here’s how I do it:

Wake up: Drink two pints of water while the kettle boils. 

Go to work: Drink tea, coffee as required to get brain working. At 11am, drink another two pints of water. 

Have lunch: Drink another two pints of water with whatever your lunch is. 

Go home: Have a pint of water as soon as you get home, then another pint with dinner. 

And that’s it. I’m done with my water by, at the very latest, about 9:30pm. It’s not difficult to manage, and even if you’re insanely busy, you’ve got time to do it – if you aren’t getting out of your chair at 11am and lunch, you should be. 

 As for results: I hit a rep PB in the squat three days after starting the GOWAD plan, and felt more energetic almost instantly. I stopped drinking so much tea and coffee. Also my abs started to make an appearance, but I don’t think that was any magical properties in the water so much as the fact that I wasn’t snacking because of thirst. And in case you’re wondering, there was actually a slight decrease in night-time bathroom trips – again, probably because I wasn’t drinking any diuretics – and a slight increase in Austin Powers-style mornings at the porcelain. Yes, it’s a plan with no drawbacks. 

HOMEWORK: Drink a gallon of water every day this week. Post your results in the comments.

Because my brain and nervous system are the product of millions of years’ evolution, I am fundamentally quite lazy. I don’t take well to wasting energy – I’m designed to be efficient and hold onto what my body still thinks are scarce resources. And because of that, a lot of my training is designed to trick myself into doing a large volume of work in quite a short space of time, because I’m not likely to do it voluntarily. If you’re one of my fellow humans, there’s a chance this will work for you too.
Enter on-the-minute training. I’ve been doing it in various combinations for most of this year, and it works for almost everything. It works because:

1. You can’t lie to yourself about your rest periods: you either get the work done, or you don’t.

2. It lets you keep your intensity high. If you set out to, say, hit a punchbag as much as you can in ten minutes, you’re going to be doing most of your punches with all the vicious, focused power of a mildly angry baby. If you do on-the-minutes, you can attack every set like Clubber Lang and then rest in the breaks.

3. Ten minutes (for instance) isn’t actually that long, so any workout that ‘only’ takes ten minutes is almost impossible to find an excuse not to do.

How does on-the-minute training work? Easy: you pick a move (or a pair of moves, or at the very most three moves) to do at the ‘top’ of each minute, ie when the clock ticks over. When the reps are done – whether that takes 10 seconds or 50, you rest. At the top of the next minute, you go again. The trick is, this works with almost anything. Here are some methods I particularly like.

Press-ups
Hence the title of this post. 10 pressups on the minute for 10 minutes is 100 press-ups. You’ve got the time to do that every day, and don’t pretend otherwise. It *should* be easy: if 10 pressups isn’t a laughably low number for you to do in a single set, then pick a number that is – even if it’s 1 – and do that. If 20 press-ups is nothing to you, do 200. You should be aiming to do a total volume of pressups that sounds mildly worrying – something you wouldn’t be able to get in three max-out sets, say.

Pull-ups
The single easiest way to get good at pullups, bar none. I’d suggest doing them like the press-ups: I do five on the minute for five minutes at the start of every workout, varying between overhand, underhand, rings and gi grips. I’m not going to failure, so it’s just a warmup – but I’m still getting 25 quality reps done every day. Want more of a challenge? Do five on the minute, but just keep going until you can’t get your five done within the alloted 60 seconds. This is a fine way to prepare for your Sunday roast. Muscle-ups, another move where going to failure tends to be counter-productive, are fantastic for OTMs.

Olympic lifts
It’s quite easy to be a baby when it comes to Olympic lifting, and kid yourself that you ‘need’ five minutes’ rest between every set. You don’t: just pick a weight that isn’t going to crush you, and do a rep or two on the minute for a few minutes. I pushed my snatch up to near-bodyweight *mainly* by doing 8 sets of 2 on the minute, with 6 sets of singles in the clean & jerk for pudding. Even with a quality warmup, this is a fine way to do a decent Oly workout in under an hour.

Farmer’s walk
If you want to burn fat, build muscle, get lean arms, build your six-pack, improve your deadlift, look like a badass and get traps like Tom Hardy, *nothing* beats the farmer’s walk. And for fat-burning especially, OTM farmer’s walk is your friend. Aim for a heavy weight and a fairly short distance: I’d suggest carrying your own bodyweight in each hand, going for 30 metres on the minute…for ten minutes. Get that done, and you have my permission to eat anything you like for the rest of the day.

Battling ropes
Far too many trainers treat these fine bits of kit, now available in loads of gyms, as a form of rhythmic gymnastics where the aim is to make increasingly hypnotic patterns with the rope. This is bullshit. Just *savage* the ropes – do 20 seconds on the minute, for ten minutes, and slam them up and down like you’re beating Jason Voorhees to death in the final reel of Friday The 13th.

It also works with punchbag intervals, dips, kettlebell swings, rowing, prowler pushes, and almost anything else that doesn’t take a minute to do one set of. Try it today.

HOMEWORK: Pick a number of pressups that you think is about a quarter of your one-set max, and do that, on the minute, for ten minutes, twice this week. Hey presto: you’ve done a load of pressups. 

 [Ed note: you may want to read Fun Times In The Pain Cave before you get into this post. Or, if you’re just here for the rowing tips, you may not. I don’t mind either way.]

In my last post, I talked about the psychological benefits of doing a 7-minute 2k on a rower – a decent standard over the Olympic racing distance – and why you should have a go at one. In this one, I’m going to talk about how to actually get it done. Because there are clever subtleties to yanking on a handle 196 times over the length of Metallica’s One (minus the intro), and you, my dear readers, need to hear them. Let’s do this.

1. Row lots

Oh how glib – and yet, unavoidable. Because apart from strengthening your lungs, heart, and rowing-specific muscles, making the energy pathways involved in a 7-minute power endurance effort more efficient, and improving your confidence in yourself and ability to gauge how much pain you can take, practicing rowing teaches you lots of other things. Like: how the proper technique should feel, and how that varies between the first pulls and the final sprint. How 26 strokes a minute at a 1:40 pace feels, compared to 30. These are things you should know. And anyway, there’s a lesson here: nothing will ever make you as good at the thing as doing the thing. Row every time you hit the gym, even if it’s for a 500m warmup or cool-down. Row for recovery. Row.

2. Attack it from both sides

To do a decent 2k, you need power endurance. You need to be able to sprint, and to maintain a decent pace for a decent length of time. And so what worked for me was following a plan in which I’d do lots of short, hard intervals in a couple of sessions a week, followed by 5-10k recovery-pace rows (so about 2:20 per 500m) to get the blood flowing through my poor, ruined muscles on my ‘recovery’ days. Recovery days are the perfect chance to make every stroke count with proper technique, and also a good chance to experiment with ‘Power 10s’ – 10 hard strokes, in which your pace might get up to 1:38 or something. You will need these for the 2k, where you should sprint the last 250m or so.

I got my training plan from Pieter Vodden and told him I wouldn’t reveal it here: but one bit of advice I can share is that, if you do 10 sets of 500m with a minute of rest in between, your average pace is what you can hold for 2k. You’re going to need average a 1:45 500m for the 7-minute row, obviously. To quote Lena Headey from 300: it won’t be quick, and you will not enjoy it. But you need to get it done.

3. Get the damper setting right

This won’t make it any easier, but it will stop you unnecessarily hamstringing yourself. It really comes down to personal preference – if you’re a lightweight (under 5’10, probably)  you might benefit from rowing at a lower damper setting with a higher stroke rate. If you’re a giant powerhouse (in which case you should be aiming for something faster anyway – how does 6:45 sound, big man?), you’ll probably benefit from rowing at a higher setting with a lower stroke rate. I hovered between 6 and 7 for every workout and settled on 7 for the 2k, usually hitting between 26 and 28 strokes a minute, climbing to 30 in the final assault.

When I finally got the 7-minute done (on my fourth attempt), I went with a strategy graciously donated by Sir Matthew Pinsent, four-time Olympic gold medallist, via Twitter. Here’s the man himself:

‘Go off at 1.41 for 30secs, settle to 1.45 flicking 1.46. fight like hell to not see 1.47 in 3rd 500 & sprint if you can.’

This is basically exactly what I did, although I went out a bit too fast and really struggled in the holding on bit. I was ready for the last 250 though, because that’s basically 20 all-out strokes (those Power 10s again) and a final burst of utter savagery. Sir Matt again:

‘It’s the patch from 800-1400m that gets you every time. get your head round that and you’re home.’

Damn straight. In every attempt I made, the 1000m mark was the point where I started playing headgames with myself, internally going ‘You cannot maintain this pace, you’ll die.’ But that’s not true. You won’t die. All you have to do is the same as you’ve already done, a fraction slower, with a burst of effort at the end. You can even fall off the rower afterwards! It’ll be totally fine.

Here’s David Hart again, with a bit more detail: ‘If you’re trying to get the best possible time, when to start the sprint is probably key. Too soon and you’ll blow up and limp home; too late, you’ll have left something in the tank and be left with some what ifs. From a performance point of view, you probably want to be coming off your sprint, so that your times are drifting back to your average pace when you cross the line (e.g. You go from 1:45, sprint to 1:38 and then your times creep back up to 1:45 as you struggle to maintain your sprint for the last few metres). From a performance POV, that’s good. From a “how you feel afterwards”, maybe less so…’