Military Workout (LEGS | UPPER BODY | CONDITIONING)

Train like a soldier and build an armored body…

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. It’s Memorial Day and we’re celebrating and commemorating those that have served our country, by serving you up one hard ass workout. we’re going with a heavy lower body calisthenics upper body and conditioning workout all rolled into one, straight from our special tactics program.

This program was designed to take military physical readiness exam testing to a whole new level; to fill in the gaps of what I felt was missing from current physical readiness exam prep testing. I hope you guys find this valuable. Again, straight form the program. You’ll be able to learn more about special tactics over at ATHLEANX. com, but in the meantime, give this one a shot.

All right, let’s kick off week two now. Let’s bring up the energy. You’re going to need to make sure that you bring it because this workout is going to be even a little bit tougher than the last one. We’re doing it again as a lower body strength focus. So heavy weights here, four sets to failure, five to six rep mx.

We’ve got our upper body calisthenics, a couple new exercises – or at least one new exercise in here for everybody – and then we’ve got to start with our gut check in. Today is a classic military endurance test – muscle endurance test. The flexed arm hang. We’ve got to do it for 1:10. Again, I told you, the numbers I’m picking here, those are good numbers.

That is the top score that they’re looking for in the military test here. They’re looking for a 1:10 flexed arm hang. So I’m going to set that as a standard here. We’ve got to make sure that is what you’re pushing toward. You may not get it, but at least if it’s in your head you have this goal you’re going to be pushing to try to get there, and that’s what we want.

If you don’t make it we’ll have some things for you to do at the end. Now, the flexed arm hang first, let’s just go through it and demonstrate it. We have a way that we do it that’s a little bit different than military standards, okay? Military standard says that when you do the flexed arm hang you can go either overhand, or underhand. We like to go overhand here for it and you’re going to get your chin up over the bar.

Again, it’s okay if you go underhand. That’s fine. You come up over the top, chin up over the bar. The key difference here is that the military allows you to continue to count this test until your arm is straight. So this is still okay, and this is still okay, and this is still okay.

Even that’s still okay. It’s until your arms go all the way straight that they disqualify you. We disqualify you when your chin goes below the bar. So if you’re up here and then as soon as you start to get down here, maybe your chin dips, that’s okay. If it comes down to here you’re out.

We’re no longer counting that. But it’s good because we’re going to apply that when we get into the end of our work out here in our punishment phase. We’re going to apply the standards to what we’re doing. Let’s get there in a second. So we have our lower body strength.

Barbell squats, alternate dumbbell reverse lunges, barbell head thrust. We’re not recreating the wheel here, guys. We’re not reinventing anything. These are classic strength training exercises. Barbell squats we know.

We don’t have to demonstrate those. Alternating dumbbell reverse lunges; I’ve covered the value of a reverse lunge, especially as it relates to people that have knee discomfort when they do regular lunges. Why? Well, we’ve talked about it on the video before – our YouTube video – that when you step out in a regular lunge your knee is in an open chain position. Again, it’s not a bad exercise, it’s just for people that have knee problems, and this could become troublesome.

They step out in an open chain position, there’s a little bit of stretch eccentrically on the quad as it is already. Then when they land there’s a lot of force that goes into that anterior knee that could cause some problems. But if we keep our foot in a closed chain position – so we’re still looking at that front leg – it’s already closed chain, meaning it’s in contact with the ground. If I step back now it stays closed chain and I can come up. I’m also not directing all that force forward.

I’m directing the force backwards and away from it. Then lastly, because I get a little bit more hip flexion here, ¼ of the quad muscles direct us and will actually be a little bit more on slack when we’re down in a more flexed hip position as we are here in a reverse lunge. So we’ll get a little less strain across the kneecap. So we just do a reverse lunge. We step backward and we come back out of it, okay?

Each leg here, taken through to five to six rep failure. Then we’ve got our barbell hip thrust and it’s kind of going back to that whole position we were in where I demonstrated how to do a forward press with a bench press. Now we’re just doing the first part of it. Again, get back into this position here and the key of this exercise is just finding the right placement. There’s two real big keys.

The placement should be right in the crease of your hip. So how do you find that? Let’s say the bar is too far down. Just lift your knees up. If you lift your knees up off the floor it’ll roll it right into that crease that it needs to be in.

Secondly, once it’s there take your hands and push away. Don’t let it just sit right down into your pelvis. That could become a little bit uncomfortable. Push it forward into your thighs. Now when I lift up it’s not resting on my bones, it’s resting on my muscles, but I don’t really feel any pain.

So when we do the hip thrust we push in that way and then we just push up, drive up through our hips. Okay, I also like to dig my heels in when I press, not going flat footed because I can activate my hamstrings more, in addition to my glutes. So there’s our heavy work. Now, for our light work- upper body. So, we’ve got assisted chin ups – and I’ll show you how to do those.

Last time I just discussed them. Now I’ll show you how. If you can fail between 15 and 20 without then don’t use the assistance, but if you’re somebody that does 7 reps, 8 reps, or 9 reps usually then you’re going to need some help. Take a band out – this is one of our ATHLEAN-Xtreme bands here. You wrap it around the bar and then put it through itself.

You take this side of it, put it through here, and pull, okay? Now, when it’s here you’re going to pull down, step into the band, come up, and now we just unweighted our body here by about 40lbs. So, now that allows you to get to 15 or 20 if you were already struggling to get there in the first place. With this being the light focus we’re not looking to really, really tax your upper body. Secondly, we’ve got the new exercise: archers.

Archers is a pushup hybrid exercise. You come down here, hands will go out wide to here, you’re going to slide to one side until your arm is straight, and then you’re going to push yourself back to the other side until that arm is straight. You’ve got to get up to a pushup position though. So here, so you slide straight, straight, trying to pull your fingers at the end. Now, it looks like a tough exercise.

It’s definitely not easy, but it’s a bodyweight movement. It is a callisthenic. It’s not going to overload you too much, but if it is – if you can’t even do the movement – do it on your knees. So if you look at it this way, you drop down, you’re here, and then slide out that way. Okay?

Finally, we’ve got, lastly, our rear delt iron cross. This is one of the underappreciated exercises that really targets one of the areas that we don’t tend to target enough. Not just the rear delts, but also rhomboids, upper-middle back. So you’re working on that entire upper posterior chain beginning here. I say to bend knees as needed to reach your rep goal.

So if you start out with your legs out straight you’re going to be arm