my training week starts on Sunday Sunday I make it a focused effort to move as much as possible ideally Outdoors endurance I essentially want to be like a mule so what I'll do on that day is because sometimes it's a social day with other people in my life if I'm on my own I'll throw on a eight or ten pound weight vest and I'll head out for a buy a 75 minute to a 90 minute slow jog with some hills and I'll try nasal breed the whole time I'll often listen to a podcast or a book if I'm with other people what I will do is I'll fill up a backpack with a bunch of heavy stuff usually some water in there too and drink it as I go and I'll do three or four or five hours of just hiking and just trying to be outside as much as possible the specific goal of that day is endurance because of the other things I do in the previous days the the 10 or 20 minutes which I you have to they come at the start really suck but what's amazing is somewhere in that 25 30 minute period you start to feel really good you actually start to adapt to it right then so these Sunday long slow jogs or hikes are really for my mind as much as they are for my body and I'm convinced that they also carry over to my ability to endure boring stuff during the week but also just my ability to work longer for longer bouts okay so that's Sunday then Monday is the goal for me is to train my legs okay first of all I just like the way that sounds to myself like leg workout on Monday but it also sets up the work week really nicely here's why I'm gonna train my legs the way that's always worked best for me for training which is a warm up and then two to three maybe four hard sets we're talking about two to four sets but usually two to three of two exercises per muscle group I should mentioned that the reason for training legs is that everyone should train legs so the large muscle groups I'm trying to maintain some lower body strength or build lower body strength and explosiveness you know the data that I see on longevity and just simply ability to perform different sports and to just feel strong throughout the body is strongly rooted in the legs yeah so don't skip leg day all right so I start with tip raises so it's gonna be a couple warm-ups maybe a 12 rep warm-up an eight rep warm-up and then I'll do you know three sets per tib of anywhere from six to ten reps okay Andy Galpin told me in the literature supports people like Brad schoenfield and others have shown that for hypertrophy for muscle growth 6 to 30 reps anywhere in there can get you hypertrophy if you go to failure and if you go hard I personally like to keep my resistance workouts an hour or less I like to train in the more or less the five to ten repetition range for strength and for hypertrophy and I'm kind of going for a mix of both so I train tips then I do sled or standing calf raises same thing two to four sets five to eight maybe ten repetitions so I'm training calves that takes about 10-15 minutes total I try and move relatively quickly through that so two to three minutes rest maybe four if I'm going for a reset then I'm weaker in the hamstrings than I am in my quads so I do two warm-ups and then two to four working sets of lying light curls or standard stuff then I go do two to four sets but typically three of glute ham raises which is an incredible exercise the equipment isn't in every gym but I'm doing you know about three you know so three or four sets of blue ham raises going slow and you know this is basically like if you were going to do a deadlift take the ground and rotate it 90 degrees and make it the wall that's what a glute ham raise really is it allows you to do a deadlift but then at the top do a leg curl raises are great lower back so entire posterior chain so then I'm done with calves and hamstrings and then I'll do two or three sets of leg extensions so maybe a warm up and then two or three sets of working leg extensions which for whatever reasons are incredibly painful I hate them but they work to isolate the quads and then two or three sets of working hack squats after a warm-up pack squats heavy heavy heavy heavy and then I'm done and so the whole purpose of that Monday workout is it's like the opposite of what I'm doing on Sunday it's get stronger maintain some size but really get stronger in the legs when you look at the literature on cognitive improvements from resistance training it's not from bicep curls it's not from bench presses I suppose it could be from things like dips which are sort of like a upper body squat of sorts especially if they're weighted or with rings or something but training the legs is key and so as I said before there are two goals one is to get the legs stronger the other is that I'm trying to create a systemic anabolic effect I want strong legs I want a strong body I want a body that can accomplish endurance and I want the cognitive effects so you get that systemic anabolic effect keep in mind the entire leg workout takes 10 minutes of warm up in about 55-0 minutes of training so the Tuesday is very different Tuesday I don't want to call it a recovery day but Tuesday I'm doing something really different first of all my legs need recovery so what I'll do is substantial amounts of deliberate heat exposure and deliberate cold exposure yes I do cold showers in the morning first thing nowadays yes it is a bad idea to do cold water immersion after hypertrophy training so just for the record you don't want to get into an ice bath after hypertrophy training in the six hours after a hypertrophy training because it can blunt the hypertrophy it blocks the inflammation which is exactly what you want to trigger the adaptation of hypertrophy but Tuesday is really about getting the maximum effect of heat exposure in cold exposure I do a protocol which is pretty intense designed to amplify growth hormone stimulate a bunch of mood positive mood promoting hormones that last not just days but weeks say the literature and just get better at it so I'll do 20 minutes of sauna hot sauna to like 260 now okay 260. but I worked up to that so 20 minutes in the sauna very hot three to five minutes in the cold plunge up to the neck back into the sauna for 20 minutes back into the cold plunge for three to five minutes back into the sauna for 20 minutes back into the cold plunge for three to five minutes it's work but it's amazing in the sense that you recover very well from the leg day you generate all the hormone neurotransmitter type of adaptations that one wants and you get very very good at tolerating heat and cold and Wednesday I do one of two things I'm either going to do a shorter duration than Sunday cardiovascular training workout so I might do I'm thinking about five minutes of warm up and then about 25 to 30 minutes of usually running for me where I'm just trying to get out and cover as much distance as I can at a fast clip but steady so I'm not Sprint stop Sprint stop that's typically what I'll do on Wednesday although if my legs are still a little bit sore that's when I'll train what I call torso what do I do I try to get pushing through the chest and shoulders I'm trying to pull for the back so what I tend to do is overhead shoulder presses after a warm-up two to three sets working sets or maybe four I like ring dips and dips these days those are hard for me but I you know two or three work sets of those so you chest shoulders and I'm gonna upset some people here but I don't tend to train back every week I do it every other week because just I have some genetic abnormality where those grow really easily and I can throw proportions off really quickly but I might do three or four sets of chins sorry Max rep chins slow with slow eccentric movements the lowering as well so all of the movements are done trying to move as much weight as possible as quickly as possible on the concentric phase and then lowering it anywhere from two to four seconds got loading it like a spring and then trying to explode I want strength I want explosiveness and some hypertrophy sneaks in because I'm working in that you know five to eight rep range so that's what I call torso because it's chest shoulders back if I every other week I'll throw in those chins I think everyone has a muscle group like this where if they train it just grows like a weed but I want to keep proportions right strength proportions as well and I do train my neck that day as well having a strong neck why is that so important well it's important because you want a strong spine and it's the upper portion of your spine the other thing that I notice that it does is it completely changes my psychology to train my neck I just naturally stand more upright yeah I find it easier to look people in the eye it's not hard for me to look people directly in the eye when I speak to them but I find I just have like my posture and presence is just better so if for whatever reason I do the cardio workout that I mentioned the 25 or 30 minutes of running that's what I do but some people might do it on the assault bike or something like that or cycling or rower on the Wednesday then I'll do that Weight Workout I just described torso on Thursday or I'll swap them so there's some flexibility built into the week travel Etc by the way the cardiovascular workouts can be done in the morning or the evening but I always prefer to do them in the morning and just get it done with and Friday is a really important day because Friday is the day that I do a short workout usually only about three minutes of warm-up and about 12 minutes of training and the goal is to get my heart rate as high as I possibly can I learned this from Andy Galpin just increasing VO2 max getting those really fast muscle fibers my favorite way to do this is I'll get on the assault bike which are the ones with the handles with the fan and do 20 second on Sprint 10 second rest 20 second on 10 seconds Tabata Tabata type thing for six to eight rounds and then what I like to do is take a band and tie it to something like a chin up bar or something and I'll squat down and jump and I'll do it as high jumping as I possibly can but I actually control The Eccentric I'm holding the band as I come down and so I learned from Peter attia I've learned from Andy Galpin that our ability to jump and land is strongly correlated with physical longevity and then Saturday is the fun one because I'm still enjoy this I'll go into the gym in the morning usually it's mid-morning and I'll do small muscle groups biceps triceps rear delts I'll do another tip and calf workout a little bit lighter than the one on leg day because leg day is coming in two days and the next day I'm doing that long hike so that that day is really to round out the smaller muscle groups that need work I want to backtrack One Step because I failed to say that Friday the idea is to get that VO2 max up but guess what it's also designed to indirectly hit the legs we hit legs on Monday oh yeah and they've recovered we now know that protein synthesis maximizes after these training workouts at about 48 hours and then starts to taper off now you read that you hear that a lot especially on social media and people think you have to hit a muscle group every 48 hours but no you hold on to the protein synthesis you generated for another couple of days so that Friday Sprint on the bike workout or Sprint on a field workout and jumping is indirectly targeting the quads and calves and hamstrings and so you're keeping them online for hypertrophy so it's that's the the schedule and again if you think about that schedule each day you're accomplishing that endurance leg strength cold and heat adaptation and all the neural stuff that goes with that torso keep the Torso strong but here again we can say that torso work is indirectly hitting biceps and triceps then running for 20 years being able to run a couple miles is a good skill and what you find is that if you train your legs properly and you give them enough rest in the cold and heat really help too you are so strong on that 20 or 30 minute run your tibs are strong you know you're no floppy feet no back pain you're running with with Vigor and you know wow like this is great and so what I've noticed in the last 24 months or so is that I continue to get stronger and better in each of these areas find that this routine has really helped me because I think it takes into account a slower recovery that is just me my nervous system doesn't recover that quickly and it also Embraces the fact that our nervous system and musculoskeletal system can train for different adaptations simultaneously across the week