Strength Training for Spartan and for Life

Spartan Beast Prep (Ep 5)

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A couple weeks ago, I walked you through a Spartan Circuit workout designed by AI. That workout is designed to build endurance and stamina for performing strength based exercises under duress. 

But what about building strength in the gym?

Well, AI has me covered there too and that’s exactly what I want to talk about today!

Let’s jump in!

Why Gym Sessions are Important

Before we get to AI, I want to take a step back and answer the question: “why go to the gym?”

It turns out that running aside, going to the gym and doing strength training is actually incredibly important for us as humans. It helps us build stronger bones, more resilient joints and ligaments, and of course it builds strong and durable muscles.

These come together to mean we can perform tasks that bring us joy for longer. Maybe it means you can lift your grandchild up with ease. Or perhaps even run, surf, and play with your grandchildren.

It also means you can help keep your balance and ability to walk later into life. 

Furthermore, it keeps you stronger later in life so you don’t break a bone as easily. Studies show mortality rates go way up after you break a hip in old age.

Strength training now is an amazing way to help prevent that.

In terms of running, gym sessions are also very helpful! Just like with longevity, strength training helps keep runners injury free. It builds stronger joints and ligaments, increases blood flow, and also makes us stronger. 

Afterall, our muscles need to be able to propel us forward at faster and faster paces. That takes strength and power, all of which you can train at the gym.

From my own personal experience, if I have some kind of pain I’m dealing with from running, whether it’s a tight calf, tight hip, achilles tenderness, or plantar fasciitis, going to the gym to do targeted exercises around that area has made a difference almost instantaneously.

So, yes, I think going to the gym for strength training is crucial to life as a runner and life in general.

How AI Made my Gym Workouts

Which leads us to the gym workouts AI made for me during this Spartan prep.

A Spartan race requires a specific type of strength. Specifically it requires a lot of grip strength and pulling strength for the upper body.

The lower body needs overall strength as we’ll be climbing up hills and bombing down hills too. The more resilient my legs, the faster I can go…especially downhill.

Once again, like with the circuit workout, I needed to prompt AI with more than just “Design me a killer strength training session.” 

I had to be specific about what I wanted, what equipment I have, the frequency of when I can train, and even some of my favorite exercises I already knew I wanted to incorporate.

After that, I got a decent workout routine. I tried it for a week, made a couple of tweaks, and am now sticking to it as best as I can.

As you saw in last week’s article, I ended up with a ring workout, 2 Spartan circuit workouts, a total body strength day, and a lower body strength day.

Today, I wanted to breakdown my total body strength day as it’s the more interesting of the 2 and my absolute favorite workout during this prep.

My Favorite Gym Workout

I will go ahead and just share the workout with you and then I’ll discuss why I like it so much:

• Warmup: Max Pull-ups

• Trap Bar Deadlift: 4x5

  • Superset: Hanging Scap Pulls – 3x10

• Weighted Pull-Ups (Fat Grips): 4x5

  • Superset: Dumbbell Lateral Raises: 3x12

• Step-Ups (Dumbbells): 3x8/leg

• Monkey Bar "Treadmill": 3x12 rungs

• Superset: 3 sets

  • Kettlebell Swings: 15

  • Dumbbell Farmers Carry: 60s

  • Hanging Leg Raises: 12

The reason I love this workout is I think it’s actually a really good split between both lower and upper body, but also heavy, compound lifts, and lighter finishers.

What do I mean by this?

Let’s take the first 2 real exercises, deadlifts and weighted pull-ups. One of those targets the lower chain and one targets the upper chain of my body. They are also both heavy weighted exercises with lower reps per set.

As an aside, I’ve enjoyed super-setting my heavy weighted exercises with a light weight shoulder mobility movement. A Spartan has a lot of hanging obstacles and while grip strength is important, shoulder mobility and flexibility is just as important too.

You’ll also notice I do the weighted pull-ups with a special grip that’s fatter than a normal bar. This is for 2 reasons:

• Spartan obstacles are a thicker bar too, so this helps train more race specificity.

• If you use a thicker bar it activates more muscle fibers and thus develops more muscle tissue. Win-win!

The two exercises after deadlift and weighted pull-ups are dumbbell stepups and the monkey bar treadmill. Both of these are lighter weighted loads when compared to the previous exercises, but I increase the repetitions to the 8-12 range. And once again one exercise targets the lower chain and the other the upper chain.

Seeing the trend here?

Finally, our finisher is a superset of 3 low weight, high repetition exercises. One targets the lower chain, one targets the upper chain, and the last targets the core.

As you can see, it is a well-rounded workout.

The second thing I love about this workout is I think it does a great job at specifically targeting the muscle groups I’ll need for the Spartan race. 

In this race, I’ll be running up a ski slope which will require a lot of driving power. The same power I use in the deadlift and especially in the dumbbell step ups.

In this race, I’ll be performing a lot of hanging based obstacles and pulling obstacles, which use the same muscles as in weighted pull-ups, grip strength from farmer’s carries, and the monkey bar treadmill is literally designed after one of the specific Spartan obstacles.

Closing Thoughts

If you look on YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok, you will be inundated with different strength plans for the gym.

It almost seems like everyone and their mother has their own philosophies regarding what to train, when to train, and how much to train.

Some are all about body weight, others powerlifting, others are “science” based lifters (whatever that means), others have different workouts for almost every day of the week and then some. The hard part is some of them also attack other philosophies as if they don’t all work. Crossfit gets a lot of hate particualrly.

This overload of information makes it really confusing to know what to do in the gym.

I do not want to add to it. I’m not telling anyone they need to incorporate this workout.

There are a lot of pieces to strength training I’m still learning.

What I have learned that I will encourage everyone with is that I think it’s important to note what you are training for. There is a huge different between “training” and just “exercising.”

Training is performing exercises with a purpose. Maybe that purpose is to get a top 10 spot in your Spartan race. Or maybe it’s to finish your first 5K. Or maybe it’s a goal of lifting up your grandchild to put the star on the tree at Christmas like that commercial like that Doc Morris commercial (iykyk). 

Exercising is performing exercises without a purpose. This is probably the quickest way to quitting that’s out there. If you don’t know your why, then you won’t want to work hard. So you’ll either quit or you’ll choose exercises that are so comfortable they don’t actually give you any growth.

I feel like this idea is just as true out of the gym as it is in the gym. If you don’t know your purpose behind whatever it is you are working towards, whether it’s your job, your relationship with God, raising your kids, growing a garden, fill in the blank, then I think that’s when we experience the most burnout.

For me, when work gets boring or difficult, I remind myself that all I do is for the glory of God, and that helps me get fired up once again.

When my content or YouTube videos don’t take off and get as many views as I want, I can remind myself one purpose to this whole creative journey is just that, to be creative and learn a new skill. And that gives me drive to keep going. 

So whatever it is you are seeking to grow in, never lose sight of your “why.” If you do that, you’ll never lose your joy.

And so until next time, run with joy!