By Jim Madden

Since TB2 was released in the summer of 2015, Apex Hill Sprints have become an obsession for many of us. By now most of you reading this article are probably familiar with this gem. For those of you new to TB, Apex is a coupling of hill sprints and kettlebell swings. It’s a match made in Heaven (or Hell!), if ever there were one. You run up the hill, knock out ten two-hand swings, and repeat as many times as you can handle. It’s just that easy . . . well maybe “easy” is not the best way to put it. I was impressed with the simplicity and comprehensive benefits of this drill – strength, speed, anaerobic capacity, and mental toughness are all addressed – so immediately I put it in my training mix with the goal of reaching Black’s “Advance/Operator” standard: 15+ rounds using the 48KG kettlebell (“The Beast”) with no breaks and jogging down the hill.

I have been running hill sprints since I started training for football in junior high (and yes at the time Ronald Regan was the President of the United States and we were still listened to music on cassette tapes) and have been swinging kettlebells for about ten years, so I started Apex with a 70lb bell and quickly got twenty rounds jogging down and no breaks. By November I was hitting fifteen rounds with The Beast, and one day in February I pushed it all the way to twenty. Here are some videos of one of my standard fifteen-round Apex workouts earlier this year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2egpDfVHoMI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5EajO6os7U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGePIRBkpgA

Since those videos appeared on the TB reddit forum, I have received a lot of questions about how to progress on Apex. Here’s a fictional, though typical, case:

Smitty wants to progress at Apex. He has a hill nearby and a 24KG kettlebell. He is a dedicated and disciplined trainee, so he hits the hill 2-3 times every week. The only problem is that after about five trips, even with some breaks and walking down the slope, Smitty is completely wasted and looking for a bucket. Now he seems to be stuck, and he is not seeing improvements. In fact, he is getting a bit discouraged and burnt out.

I have three recommendations for Smitty: (a) Build your aerobic base, (b) master your kettlebell, and (c) approach your Apex programming with a “periodized” mindset. Let’s look at each of these recommendations in some detail.

(a) Build your aerobic base. Sure, Apex is paradigmatic HIC-style workout. There is, however, a considerable endurance aspect to this sort of training. For example, when I go twenty rounds on the hill I am going to be on my feet, moving and working continuously for 30+ minutes. Somebody who cannot easily sustain a 45 minute LSS run is going to wilt very quickly when he tries to push his Apex rounds into the double digits. Like everything else in TB programing, becoming awesome begins with building your base. Once your body gets used to sustained periods of work, everything gets easier. Thus, my first recommendation for Smitty is to make sure he is keeping his endurance tank topped off with a solid 8-12 week annual base building block.

(b) Master your kettlebell. Pavel Tsatsouline’s Simple and Sinister program is the best plan available for getting deadly at swings. By Pavel’s standards you have mastered a kettlebell once you can do 100 one-hand swings (10L-10R x 5) in 4.5 minutes as a matter of routine, and I hit that benchmark with The Beast before I started working on Apex. The effect is that the sets of ten two-handed swings required for Apex were very easy for me, even with a very heavy kettlebell. In fact, I often feel as though I’m recovering from the sprints while I’m doing my swings. As a rule of thumb, I recommend that you hit the S&S standard with a kettlebell before using it for Apex. If you haven’t mastered your lightest kettlebell yet, work on becoming a stud at regular hill sprints until you get your swings up to par. Since Apex unlikely to be a 2020 Olympic event, there is no need to be in a hurry here.

It is easy to work S&S swings into your Operator or Zulu Template. For example, if you use the recommend Operator cluster of SQ, BP, and WPU, you can very easily put S&S swings at the end of some of your barbell sessions (that’s what I do when I’m running “Black+Operator”). You can also very easily incorporate S&S into a base building template. K. Black mentions a client who LSS runs in the mornings and does swings in the evening five days each week in the “Unconventional Approaches” section of TB2. I recommend that Smitty make sure he absolutely owns his 24KG bell before he incorporates it into his hills sprints. In the meantime, he can proudly work on dominating his hill without swings.

(c) Approach your Apex programming with a “periodized” mindset. When you go to the gym and squat or bench press, hopefully you don’t expect to hit a 100% 1RM every time out. As any reader of TB knows, that is the path to ruin. Rather, you spend most of your time in the 70-90% range. You vary the intensity of your work through that range, and rarely do you absolutely redline the engine. In my experience, Apex behaves much more like barbell training than other forms of HIC. I have zero science to back that up (so help yourself to disagree), but that is definitely my experience.

What this amounts to practically for me is to incorporate variations in either volume (the number rounds) or intensity (the length of the sprint) into my Apex sessions. Notice that I don’t vary the weight of the kettlebell, because I only use a bell that I have mastered. The swings are sort of a “given,” and I tend toward volume variations. My PR on the hill I’m running in the videos is twenty rounds, but most days I do 15 rounds. If I don’t feel like “Super Jim” or there’s a big squat on the horizon, I might settle for 12 rounds. If I want to push myself a bit, I’ll go to 17 rounds. Notice that I’m keeping it in 60-85% effort range (in terms of volume). In any event, I almost always leave the hill feeling like I have a couple rounds left in the proverbial tank.

For our guy Smitty this means that that he might need to settle for some fairly short sessions. If his PR is 5 rounds, then most days he should keep his sessions to 3-4 rounds. He won’t be pushing to near vomiting every session. If he doesn’t feel like he is getting enough work in, he can always add some more sessions. Lower volume, higher frequency, crisp sessions. . . . sound familiar? If Smitty absolutely cannot stand such a brief workout, there is nothing stopping him from adding some burpees or a fast 800-1600m run as a finisher, but I would prefer high frequency, high quality before adding anything on top of Apex. Nobody ever became a fat slob by doing hill sprints+swings at an 80% three times weekly.

You could also lower the intensity (in terms of the length of hill) and raise the volume by increasing the number of rounds. In this case, Smitty might run only half the length of his hill (or just find a shorter hill) but push the number of reps. For example, sprinting half the distance, Smitty might make as many 8-10 rounds. Once again, the idea is to keep the perceived total effort at manageable 75-90%.

Here’s how we might put it all together into a mini-cycle:

Week 1 – Distance emphasis: full hill for 60-90% of PR number of rounds

Week 2 – Repetition emphasis: 1/2 the distance for as many reps to reach 75-90% perceived exertion

Smitty can run three of these mini-cycles right along with a standard Operator template, and then at the end of a six week (or longer) block he can test his Apex progress just like his barbell lifts. On test day let it rip! Smart money says that Smitty will have a new max on Apex, and he can adjust his numbers for the next block accordingly.

The question of frequency for your Apex sessions is likely to arise. Like any frequency/recovery issue the “right answer” is going to vary among athletes depending on age, diet, injury history, other stressors, experience, the weight of the kettlebell, difficulty of the hill, etc. For me, one Apex session each week is enough. Knocking out 150-200 swings with The Beast is definitely going to cost you something in terms of recovery, especially for middle-aged trainees like me. Younger trainees or those using light bells are probably going to get away with a lot more. Here’s what a typical week looks like for me when I’m doing “Black+Operator”:

Sunday: SQ/BP/WPU + Swing (48KG x 100)

Monday: 600m Resets

Tuesday: SQ/BP/WPU (morning) and jujitsu practice (evening)

Wednesday: Off or LSS (alternating weeks)

Thursday: SQ/BP/WPU + Plank and Shank

Friday: Apex Hill Sprints x 12-20 (48KG)

Saturday: Off

Some weeks I might skip the swings on Sunday and instead do BOO with a 40KG kettlebell or Meat Eater II with the 48KG. I have found that this set-up (which is really just textbook TB2) keeps me consistently in the 15+ range for Apex and it gives me a full day of rest between my biggest day of swings and my next squatting session.

There are other variables you can tinker with, most obviously jogging vs. walking down the hill and the duration (if any) of the rest period at the bottom. The grade of the slope is another factor you can play with (assuming you have multiple hills available). Suffice it to say these recommendations are not the last word on making Apex progress, and you can come up with a very effective way of managing the load by manipulating any of these variables. Whatever you come up with, just remember that constant all-out, go to you puke training is not a long-term recipe for progress. There is a time and a place for pushing your limits (save the “death wish” intensity for test day), but the bulk of your work needs to be in the boring but effective sweet spot. Moderate the difficulty of your Apex sessions so that you can show up at your hill and methodically put in the work. Over time the effects of all those trips up and down and the hundreds of swings will accumulate and you will find yourself making big progress.

If I can be any help to you, feel free to contact me through the reddit forum or the comment section here. Good luck as you meet the Apex challenge, and WHEN you find yourself swinging The Beast at the top of a nasty hill be sure to send a pic or a video. Train consistently and intelligently, and it WILL happen!

Jim Madden lives in Kansas with his wife and their six children, where he is also a professor of philosophy at Benedictine College. In between training sessions and chasing his kids around, he has managed to publish numerous scholarly articles and a book on the mind-body problem, Mind, Matter, and Nature (CUA Press, 2013). In 2006 Jim was recognized as the Benedictine College Educator of the Year.