On most days you head to the gym and ‘do the right thing’. You take out your training log, follow the reps and sets, add a little more weight than last week and walk out the door feeling pretty darn good about yourself. Other days, you’re not quite ‘feeling it’ and you spend less time squatting and more time chatting up the hot chick in the squat rack. Hey, it happens. Then there are some days you just walk into the gym feeling extra pumped and super focused.
Sure you could bang out your regularly scheduled training program. Hell, the way you’re feeling you could probably hit a couple of PR’s. But, today, you’re same-old training program just won’t do. You want to tackle something tough. You want a challenge. You want to train so hard that you crawl out of the gym. You want to GET CRUSHED.
Lucky for you, we’re here to help. Here, we give you a tough, one-off workout that you can try when you are looking for the ultimate training challenge of just feel like you need a break from your regular routine. But be warned, this training program will leave you totally CRUSHED. So, if you have a hot date tonight, need to walk like a normal human being tomorrow or want to sit on the toilet without your legs screaming at you well into next week, this is not the workout for you.
This workout is a concurrent ascending and descending ladder, which is just a fancy way of saying “you’ll feel so swole that you may have to go up a shirt size for the next couple of days”. You’ll be working with two movements: a flat dumbbell bench press and a chin up.
Start with one rep of the bench press. Rest as little as possible and perform 10 reps of dead hang pull-ups. You will then perform two reps of the bench and 9 reps of the pull ups. Keep adding one rep to the bench and taking one away from the pull up each set until you are performing 10 presses and one pull up. The goal is to rest as little as possible but you may need to grab a breath either between sets, between movements or, even, in the middle of a set.
Dan Trink is a personal trainer, strength coach and nutritional consultant based in New York City. To find out more about Dan visit www.trinkfitness.com.
