 Our first caller is James from Georgia. Hey, what's up, James? How can we help you? Hey, guys. I'm so excited to be here today. I can't believe I'm actually talking to you guys. This is a dream come true. So a little bit about me. I'm currently in the Army National Guard right now, and I'm hoping to go to Ranger School to start coming April. My current goal, I'm trying to increase my endurance so that I can pass a Ranger physical fitness test, which requires me to be able to do 49 push-ups in two minutes, 59 sit-ups in two minutes, five mile run and 40 minutes or less, six pull-ups, and then my personal goal is to get my five mile run down to 35 minutes here at home. So that way there's no doubt that I can go to Ranger School and pass the RPFT. I'm also trying to increase my endurance with working 12 miles with a 43-pound ruck. I need to be able to do this 12 mile ruck in three hours or less. Let's see. About a month and a half ago, I hired a personal trainer, a founding guy on Instagram. He claimed to have gone to Ranger School. He claimed to have worked with Special Forces Group and claims to have been training soldiers like myself who want to go to Ranger School or SF selection on the side for the past four or five years. He's been having me do a lot of Metcons with long distance running as well as strength training all on the same training day. For example, in the first month, he had me doing four days a week of something like one of the training days was bench, three sets, four to six, 85% of your training max deadlift, building up 85% and doing doing two sets at 85% of three to six reps, then doing a 21, 15, and nine pull-ups and wall ball and toaster bar Metcon as fast as you can. And then going into incline dumbbell bench, three sets of eight dumbbell hammer curls, three sets, 10 to 12 and then going in for a five mile run at the end of it. It was killing me doing stuff like that. I had not been doing Metcons. I'd been running all of y'all's maps, programs, maps, aesthetics, maps, anabolic maps, performance, maps strong. Maps anywhere. I've been doing maps prime and I mean, y'all made y'all's programs. And, you know, like there's no Metcons in any of those. Intentionally, yes, I was dying. So after the first month, I talked to the guy, told him I couldn't do four days a week. I'm currently a RN that works in the hospital at a pediatric cardiac. I see you works night shift and doing four days a week. I mean, I was going in there off of no sleep, having the caffeine up just to be able to get through everything and body end of it. I mean, it was doing everything I could just to get home. I bet. Since then, talk to the guy. He's got me down doing three days a week now, pretty much the same style of training. Let's say, yeah, doing three days a week, the same style of training. I followed you guys for about three years now. I feel like he's just throwing everything in the kitchen sink at me without any real progression strategies. He also refuses to give out his personal phone number for me to be able to contact him or his actual last name. So I have no idea to even verify. This is telling me the truth about anything. So a friend claims to have found him on Facebook. Apparently she's good at stalking people. I don't know. It was kind of a whatever. Believe her, girls are really good. Yeah, we'll find a way. Anyways, like he wants me to contact him through his like company's Instagram and his company's email instead. And he's pretty quick to email me back, but it's still kind of weird. I mean, you all have given me a little red flags to look out for. And he kind of checks them all off. So my question basically is what would y'all recommend me do to increase my running endurance and rucking to get a five mile time to 35 minutes, a 12 mile ruck in three hours or less. And then just trying to maintain as much muscle mass as possible to help me not get injured. Yeah. How many times a week right now are you doing the rucking right now? How often do you you test this? So what I do for rucking, the rucking I've not as worried about. I've been doing it for four years now. The best way I've learned to train for rucking is actually by biking. It's got my ruck time down from three hours to in college. I was doing a 12 mile ruck with a 50 pound ruck in two hours and 15 minutes. OK, pretty good. You know, you know, something that a lot of people kind of don't consider when it comes to, you know, passing physical type tests, is that a great deal, a large percentage of your success doing those tests is actually getting good at the skill of the components of that test. OK, so to give you an example, you know, you let's say you wanted to get better at doing pull ups. Well, yeah, you can make your lats stronger. You can make your back stronger, doing different exercises. But one of the best strategies would be just to practice pull ups because that'll get you back your back stronger. But also it's practicing the skill that you need to actually, you know, do in this particular test. So training for specific tests isn't as complicated as people think. I think one of the best strategies you could do is literally practice the test a couple days a week, two or three days a week, do the tests that they're going to be asking you to do in order to, you know, get into ranger school. And then you may want to add one day a week of basic traditional strength training with mobility, and you'll probably be just fine. If anything, you'll notice that you'll you'll improve you'll improve at a pretty rapid rate. I'm glad you stopped what you were doing earlier when you noticed that you just had no energy to go to work. Yeah, that's been your tires in the dirt. Yeah, that's a really, really big red flag. Like you should not feel like you're totally zapped and your performance is declining when you're doing a workout. Well, if there's if he's not doing any if the test, the ranger school doesn't require to do wall ball, there's no fucking reason for you to be doing that. There's other than just exhaust you to exhaust you. So it makes no sense. It makes no sense to do a movement like that if it's not going to benefit anything else that you're doing. But, you know, you are he is an example, though, of somebody who, you know, we talk about weight vests, like always the knucklehead guy who's wearing a weight vest in the gym that probably has no business wearing it. This is a perfect example of somebody, though, that this is I would do the test and I would slowly scale the weight vest, right? So I would I would run the test with a light weight weight vest, improve my time, start to slowly add weight to the vest slowly. Before you know it, you're going to you're blazing through the test with, you know, 40, 50, 60 pounds on you. And then whatever you need to do for the time, I don't know what the weight. What's the weight for the actual test? 40, 50, 30, 35 pounds. Is that what you said? Yeah. For the ruck, it's a 45 pound. Oh, 45. Yeah. So if you could get up to where you're doing 50 pounds, you know, going going through the test, like, is this incline? Are you doing it on like roads? It's on a road. So it'll be some incline, some decline. Yeah. So here's a good example of kind of what I'm talking about when I say, you know, use the test as your workout. What that doesn't mean is three days a week, you do the exact test. So in other words, you don't do the exact 49 push ups and as fast as you can. And, you know, run your five miles and try and get under 40 minutes. What it means is you're doing the exact same exercises, but in different, you know, different intensities and volumes. So for example, and this is just I'm throwing this out there, one day a week, you may do the actual test. So you're doing the exact numbers, the exact times that you're aiming for and distances and trying to improve and trying to improve it. The other one other day a week, it might be half. So cut everything in half and then do the other, do the exact test. And then a third day a week would be down to a third. So you're almost doing like a sprint in your training. So something like that would get you to improve quite dramatically. And then one day a week of like four to five compound lifts and some mobility work, and you're probably going to be better than OK. Where would you say is your biggest area of struggle in those different items? The run, the run, I can get the push ups on, I can get the setups, I can find it, pull ups, the ruck, I'm not really that worried about. It's just one of those things that you just got to push through. But the run, my five mile run right now is currently sitting at like 43 minutes. And that's well rested going into the run at Ranger School. It's going to be six o'clock bright and early in the morning, probably earlier than that. We'll go into our range of physical fitness tests. So it's going to be straight into push ups for two minutes, straighten the setups, straight into the run. And are you getting up at six and sort of emulating that some days with your running schedule? Sorry, what was that? Are you emulating that in terms of like what time of the day you train and everything else? I try to working nights. It's a little bit difficult. Usually my training schedule now is I work Sunday, Monday, Tuesday at the hospital. Today is Wednesday. It's usually a rest day because I try to wake up around two o'clock so I can flip myself back to days and not be a night owl with nothing going on. Well, the endurance part is going to be something that Thursday, Friday, Saturday, I'll get up early and go run. OK. Yeah. Just just a gradual progression of that. If that's the area of focus, I would just like gradually start to include that a bit more throughout the week and start adding a bit more time devoted to that. The other thing that I might add that, Sal, you didn't say on those example days is a strength day where you actually load all these things, right? So maybe you're not getting 58 push ups or 69 sit ups or six pull ups, whatever, but do a heavy day. Sure. Do a heavy loaded day and get strong at all those movements. Very rarely do you see people do like loaded sit ups, but this would be a perfect example of one of those three or four days. I would do like some loaded sit ups. So so in other words, you're doing the same skills a few days a week. Some days it's the same distance and exactly like the test. Some days it's loaded in much shorter amount of time or reps. More strength, right? Other days, it's shorter and faster. So you're practicing on sprinting through instead of running five miles, you're running two miles, but you're running it really fast. So that's what I mean by focusing on the skill of what you're doing. You definitely want to do some mobility work, too, because you're doing the same movements over and over again. So you're running a lot, you're doing a lot of push ups, a lot of pull ups. If you don't do mobility work, if your technique and form is even off a little bit, you could find yourself with some nagging injuries and then forget it, right? You're not able to do what you want to do because things hurt. And then one day a week you do like four basic strength training exercises and you should not fatigue yourself. You're just kind of practicing your deadlifts and your squats and your presses and that kind of stuff. And then you're probably pretty much set. Now, the other part of your question was keeping as much muscle mass as possible. I would forget, not that you're not going to keep muscle mass, but don't worry about that. Don't worry about aesthetics. Don't worry about anything else. Not only that, that actually is not advantageous for what we're training for right now. Just focus on performance because the ranger schools, they don't give a shit what you look like and how great your pecs look. They only care about your performance. Now after that, after you pass and you know, maybe you can train for aesthetics and that kind of stuff a little later, but for now it's all focused on performance and nothing is going to give you a greater return than actually practicing the things that you have to do in the test. I mean, it's quite remarkable. I mean, I've trained with athletes and people where I beat them at exercises all day long. But then when we do a specific skill, even if it uses the same muscles that I typically am stronger at, they kick my ass because they practice those skills so often. So don't discredit that. What you don't want to do is look at your overall general fitness as the goal. Although that is an important thing to focus on, you want to look at the skills because the rangers school is testing you specifically on skills. What they're not saying is, we're going to generally test your endurance and we're not going to tell you what we're going to do. We're going to generally test your chest and triceps strength, but we're not going to tell you what it is. They're literally telling you, you're running, you're doing push-ups, you're doing pull-ups, you're doing sit-ups, and you're going to be doing a rock. So because you know those specific things, you got to get good at them. Yeah, a majority of your... Get strong at them, build endurance around them. I mean, it's focused mainly around that. And like you said, I would only add a couple of the big four lifts in there just to complement some of that stuff, but I would not do it to fatigue. I would do straight sets, plenty of rest. I think that would be a great strategy for you. Yeah, anytime somebody needs to take a test for something, what they're actually... It's almost like this, like, okay, let me ask you a question, right? Let's say I was going to test you on general physiology, and I'm not going to tell you on human physiology, and I'm not telling you what I'm testing you on. You'd have to learn the whole human body to prepare for some random test. But what if I told you, here's the 10 questions that I'm going to ask you on the test. What are you going to spend your time focusing on, right? You're not going to waste your time on general physiology. If you want to pass the test, you're going to focus specifically on the 10 things that I'm going to test you on. So they're literally giving you the workout. The only real thing you need to focus on programming is one day a week, do exactly what they're going to test you on. One day a week, do it maybe half distance, half volume, try and do it faster. And another day a week, do it even shorter, but maybe loaded. And there you go. Now you're kind of phasing each one of those skills for strength, strength endurance, and then just endurance, and it's going to make you better at the test. Does that make sense? Yes. Excellent. Now I know you said you had a lot of our programs. I think you have them all. Get them in the forum. Yeah, are you in our forum, James? I think I am still, I haven't paid for it in a while, but... Okay, so here's what we're going to do. We're going to charge you because you've been skating by yourself. Yeah. What the hell's going on? You've been getting away, Scott, for you. No, I'm just kidding. If you are in there, James, what I would like, if you decide to fire your no-name trainer, is I would like for you to hit to every month or so, every few weeks, go in there and tag us. Yeah, I would love to hear the update on this. Ask questions, and there's other people in there. We have other military people in there who are experienced in other trainers. And just get some consensus and kind of get some virtual coaching that way. I think that'll benefit you greatly. If you're not in there, we'll let you in for free, by the way. And then, James, what's the etiquette if you and I are friends and you pass Ranger School and you get one of those shirts, can I wear one? Is that okay or is that frowned upon? I'm serious, serious question. I can definitely get you one. I don't want it until you make it. When you make it, I want one and then I rock it. And then if people ask me, I'll say James is my friend. Yeah, I don't think you can say you're a Ranger. It's got to say something like a friend or a Ranger. No, no, no, I used to have one because my boy had one. And it just says Ranger across the sixth shirt. Yeah. I know you know, right, James? Yeah, they look awesome. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. And they don't just like hand them out all over the place. So it's like they're rare to get a hold of. And I want to make sure I have a friend that I can say that's a Ranger right now. So when you get past, you do that. You hit me up and then you do all the hard work and we'll wear the shirt. Send us an extra medium. Extra medium, please. Yeah. Thanks, James. Thank you. No problem. Yeah, when you it's when you have a specific test, you know that they're going to test you on. They're literally giving you generally the workout that you want to. It's almost like they're giving you the answer. Why do you why does this CrossFit make it way into so many things like this? Because that's the medium they think is like, I got to get all this endurance and strength all at once. And so just that's the one where everything gets so muddy because they just smash it all together. You know what I mean? It kind of works. That's why. Because it's a very temporary window. I mean, if this poor guy wasn't. It works better than nothing. Right. Well, I mean, if he wasn't like working and had a life on top of training, he probably could sustain this ridiculous amount of training that they have going on. And then he'd probably build so much resiliency that he would be able to power through the test and actually do okay. So maybe he would pass this test with this going this route. But there's such a smarter way to go about it. I love the analogy. I've never heard any of us use the analogy like that. Like you're right. Like you have a test. You know what the questions are. You could go study a million other things related to that. You know, all the other exercises that exist. Or just refine what's actually going to be there. Yeah, or just know those 10 questions inside and out. I love breaking that apart. Like you said, with different approaches to each one of those types of exercise. So you do it fast. You do it long. You know, you do like a slower, gradual kind of progression of it. I think I could add a little bit to what you said. Because one would I definitely think that you should do a heavy strength component. Sure. You know, I think that would. It's like phasing the test, right? Yeah, I think a heavy strength. And then I would actually even do one that probably pushes him a little bit further. So that will really push the endurance. Yeah, so and then exactly it's just more focus on it. Maybe he doesn't have the vest on or he has half the weight on the vest and then I would exceed the distance. We're going to pass the amount of time that you're supposed to do. Yeah, so give him, so he's building that tank a little bit. So you have like an endurance day. You have kind of like a really heavy power strength day and then something maybe in the middle. I mean, but the key is you're practicing the same skills that they're going to test you on. That makes the biggest, the absolute biggest difference. I mean, look, if one of the biggest examples of what we're talking about is the Olympics, right? The Olympics are, is one of the most competitive places where you're going to see athletic performance worldwide. And in the early days of the Olympics, what people thought would make the best athlete was general athletes. So shop putters, long distance runners, wrestlers, they all kind of look the same. But eventually because they're so competitive and you wanted your country to win, you started to notice what was called the democratization of these particular events where shop putters look nothing like long distance runners. And that's because to be a very good shop putter means you probably look a lot different and train a lot different. Different leverage. That's right. So if they're telling you what they're going to test you on, practice those skills and only do other skills as a way to prevent injury, to prevent imbalances, to improve mobility. But the whole approach where you're like, oh, you need strength and endurance. Okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to do all this stuff that's around strength and endurance and do very little of the skills that they're going to test you on. That's the wrong approach, complete wrong approach.