Training without weights: a special forces training for a strong and compact physique

I would like to share a cool conditioning exercise that I came up with a few months ago to get stronger and fitter in a short amount of time. It incorporates the concept of “Ladders” found in Pavel Tstatsouline’s book “Power to the People”. In this book, Pavel shares the training secrets of the Soviet commandos and the athletes he used to train with that allowed the Russians to dominate other countries in the Olympics. . This is very popular with the Marines and SEALS, and we use this type of training to get really high levels of raw strength and force endurance while maintaining our long distance runs.

What are the stairs?

Basically, you’ll pick an exercise and start at the “bottom” of the ladder doing 1-5 reps. You will rest the same number of seconds as reps per set. So if I start doing 2 push-ups, I’d rest 2 seconds, do 4 push-ups, rest 4 seconds, etc. until you reach a specific number. You want to try to do as many reps as possible without failing. This is different from a pyramid set in that you stop at the top of the ladder in this workout, but in a pyramid set you will go up AND down. This is great for building muscle, but not for strength or muscle definition. Stairs are an excellent tool that can be applied to almost any training plan. I absolutely love them.

My exercise finisher “Special Forces”

You will need access to a pull up bar. You will do 3 “super ladder sets” of push-ups and pull-ups. This means that you will complete a ladder of push-ups and then immediately transition to pull-ups with no rest. After this “super set” (doing 2 exercises in a row), you’ll rest for 30-60 seconds, then repeat at least 2 more times. Focus on getting perfect reps at a medium pace and stop before you feel like you can’t do any more. If I’m prepping guys for the Marines or SEALS, we’ll do ladder push-ups from 2 reps to 14 reps going up 2 reps at a time, and we’ll do pull-ups from 1 rep to 7 reps going up 1 rep at a time, and repeat this cycle 4 times. We do this as a poor finisher of a long ruck march or run fairly regularly and a lot of guys can max out at least 100 push-ups and 20 pull-ups for our PT tests.

Why this type of training builds a hard and “compact” physique

I love this workout because it combines a few key training principles in one session. The stair principle builds strength, endurance, and conditioning, as a high volume of repetitions is built up in a short period of time, but the muscles are not “pumped” due to rest periods. By layering push with pull exercises, I took advantage of opposing muscle groups helping each other. Basically, alternating pushing with pulling gives each muscle group a break while also telling the central nervous system to start connecting the neurons that fire individual muscle fibers. Essentially doing pull-ups will start to help doing pull-ups and vice versa. Very cool! The more you compress the time frame of the workout, the more fat-burning hormones you release to make it a conditioning workout as well.

How I used this training method to duplicate my usual pull-ups and master the one-arm pull-ups

After doing this workout for the last 6 months, I increased my pull-up max from 20 to 40 reps and pull-ups from 100 to 135 in 2 minutes. I also think it helped me achieve one-arm pull-ups, which I just mastered a week ago (and which I’ll be posting about soon!). Doing this type of high-volume, low-rep training with perfect form has similar effects to a weightlifting cycle. In fact, a ladder workout is basically a complete cycle of powerlifting compressed into a few minutes. The really cool thing is that I never feel sore from doing exhausting sets again, but my strength and conditioning level continues to improve.