Incentive Training for SE - "The Quarterdeck"

[grouchyjarhead]

Shared initially on r/tacticalbarbell.

In Marine Corps boot camp, when you screwed up you had to undergo what was called "incentive training". This is a nice sounding term for what essentially amounts to getting smoked physically and mentally until the drill instructor gets tired (which never seems to come fast enough...) It often involves changing from one exercise to another quickly, with little rest in between. Needless to say, this is not exactly a thrilling time when you were called to the quarterdeck and even the PT studs were left a mess by the end of it.

In GoRuck events, they tend to have similar sessions which can often make or break someone right off the bat. I've seen quite a few people quit during the beginning PT simply because of this fact. Every now and then due to injury (which happened to me once unfortunately), but most of the time they just mentally quit beforehand. I was looking for a way to train this way when I was struck by a bit of inspiration courtesy of my old DIs.

I personally call this approach a "Quarterdeck" session. It's essentially a circuit of just a handful of SE exercises, but done in a Every Minute on the Minute (EMOM) fashion. I used this as a weekly SE session to prepare for my last GoRuck, utilizing just three exercises: rucksack overhead squats, rucksack push-ups, and rucksack mountain climbers (left and right counts as one). I started with 10 reps of each exercise for 30 minutes, so all told I did 10x10 for each exercise, and eventually worked up to 60 minutes straight for a total of 20x10 (200 reps) of each exercise. Needless to say, when the PT portion came, I rocked it. Combined with my "fun rucks" the only sore part of me was my quads and that was due to the insane amount of lunges I did (not only did the group lunge walk across a long bridge downtown, but during the welcome party I ended up doing a ton of extra lunges as I had the team weight on my back and couldn't do the burpees/crawls/etc. the others were doing so I just did boatloads of lunges).

What I really like about the Quarterdeck approach is how versatile it is. You can make it longer (like I did - each session I added just one extra set of each, or an extra 3 minutes, up to the full hour). You can do more reps (this is more the approach I would take - I would probably progress this with a TB strength template, adding time each week up to Week 6, then the next cycle drop back down the sets but up the reps slightly). You can do more exercises (just adjust times and sets accordingly - if you're doing 5 exercises, you'll only get in 6 sets of each within a 30 minute period). Or you can even boil it down to just one (imagine a 30 minute Quarterdeck session of just burpees). Naturally this would work awesome with kettlebell exercises as well, which is already popular. You can do your SE work with a barbell as well (though I would avoid the Olympic lifts - stick to basic compound lifts).

[nickgoldma]

Would this be an acceptable use for SE during a BB block, or Fighter Bangkok?

[grouchyjarhead]

I basically did two days of Fighter and one day of IT for my GoRuck before the 3rd Edition came out.