On Saturday I finished my 8th and final week of Tactical Barbells Base Building Program. I pulled this program straight out of Tactical Barbell II Conditioning (Amazon link here). The book comes in hardback, but I bought the kindle edition so that I could reference it on my phone. Pretty cheap read, but amazingly valuable.
My Background: I primarily come from an athletics background. Played football and wrestled in high school, then walked on to my colleges powerlifting and rugby teams. Ran a ton in college in preparation for a few military screeners, some personal bests included a 20 minute 3 mile, and a 9:23 1.5 mile run. Tore my patella tendon and fractured my knee senior year, and pretty much stopped taking cardio seriously after that. Currently active duty, with a job that averages a little over 100 hours a week of work weeks when not deployed, and some wild sleep patterns. 5ā10, 215, you can view my log for my lifts, but some representative PRs would be 405x10 deadlift, 350x5 squat, and 170x5 barbell overhead.
My goals: maintain strength while improving cardio and running performance. Im not pretty, and donāt care to be. I want to be capable. Strength is in a decent spot, but I want to be an athlete again. Additionally, my active duty time is approaching its end, and I am considering a few very physically demanding jobs, or at least jobs that have some intense PT tests as part of the application process, so I want to be prepared for those.
Why Base Building: to be frank, I largely did this program because it scared me. Iāve never liked running, and have largely avoided it altogether ever since my knee injury. The idea of running this much sounded like a recipe for disaster, and I was frankly worried that Iād be able to manage physically. If we are being honest, A smaller but real part of me was worried about the mental game. running for an hour straight sounds miserable, and the idea of doing that over and over sounded like my personal hell. Which is why I chose it. Iāve never been a moderation guy, if I want to really commit myself to getting back into training my conditioning, I need to jump in feet first. So I did.
Program Modifications: if Iām going to review a program, I should at least be honest about how I tweaked it to my liking. First off, I ran the conditioning aspect exactly per the program. Never missed a day, never cut a workout short. I chose LISS running for almost all my endurance sessions, with 3 sessions over the 8 weeks swapped over for bike or elliptical, just to spare my knee when it was flaring up. For strength, the program says any 2 day a week program would suffice, and offers its own. I instead ran a 2 day a week 5-3-1 template from the Forever book, and increased it to 3 days a week for the last two weeks of the program, for honestly no good reason other than wanting to hit the weights to blow off some work stress. Other than the above, no alterations were made to the program.
Nutrition: The book gives very broad guidelines for nutrition that can somewhat be summed up with Jim Wendlers guidance of ādonāt eat like an asshole.ā One thing the book very much does stress is to eat enough to fuel training, to include eating sufficient carbs. I was eating a lot this entire training block, 1-2 ācheatā meals a week. A standard days nutrition looked generally like this.
Breakfast: Banana smothered in almond butter, high protein Greek yogurt.
Lunch: Monster Mash of rice cooked in bone broth, 8oz ground beef, lots of spinach and carrots
Dinner: red beans and rice with 8oz ground turkey, 1 cup mixed veggies, 1 whole avocado
Pre bed meal: 12 oz skinless chicken thighs, 200 cal mixed nuts, a ton of dill pickles. (eating a lot of salt helps me not feel dizzy when I lift heavy)
Also making sure to drink a hydration packet mix every day prior to training.
The program: Without giving away specifics, the program can be broadly summarized as this: 5 weeks of 3x per week zone 2 cardio, with increasing duration over the weeks, followed by 3 weeks of 2x a week more intense running sessions paired with 1 longer endurance session a week, plus the 2x a week strength work. Itās truthfully fairly simple. But that doesnāt mean itās not effective:
The results:
I started this program running 30 minutes at 5.2 mph. Thatās around an 11:30 mile, for just over 2.5 miles. This wasnāt a max effort run, but I was probably pushing a bit harder than zone 2 realistically. I would dread my runs, especially by week 4 where the runs would be a fill 60 minutes each. But they felt easier. The effort needed to keep going felt less and less, until by week 5 I was running 60 minutes at 5.5 mph and keeping my heart rate lower than that first 30 min session at 5.2
The real magic came around week 6. Once I stopped doing only zone 2 work, I saw the magic of it. All the hours of slowly plodding along had primed me to push harder when I wanted to. I would do a hard 3 miles, and spend the first two miles just waiting to open up the engines on my last mile. Where a couple mile run would have been intimidating to me before this program, I know see that distance and think āthatās it?ā
Perhaps the biggest PR can be shown in my 45 minute āwarrior runā I did a few days ago, where I ran 5.18 miles in 45 minutes, and honestly had enough left in the tank that I was kicking myself for holding back my pacing for most of the run. My resting heart rate before this would average around 60bpm, getting down to about 55 when I slept. Now, itās averaging about 54 bpm, getting down to around 47 when I sleep. Weight has stayed the same, almost exactly, though I do feel like I look a bit leaner than I did before. My strength numbers actually help up pretty well, and I even hit a few PRs during this program, though I attribute that more to riding the momentum from my work BEFORE the program more than I do to the program itself. This is a conditioning protocol after all.
Is this the best running shape Iāve ever been in? No. But, I havenāt spent years consistently running like I had before. The amount of progress Iāve seen in 8 weeks has been astounding, and even if Iāve done faster before, Iāve never felt as comfortable running as I do now. Being older, with more accumulated injuries, and fitting this in on top of the workload I have, Iām pretty damn pleased with the results.
Would I recommend it: For anyone who is military or LE, wholeheartedly yes. This is one of the best programs to bring someone up to speed on their conditioning, and sets you up amazingly for continued work with either Tactical Barbells Green or Black protocol. For the average gym goer, Iād say if you are looking to bring up your conditioning, or test your mental fortitude, then this is a no brainer. I honestly wish I had this resource when I was back in college, as i think I could of significantly improved some performance metrics with some smarter programming than I had at the time.
That being said, If you want to do tons of cardio to lose weight and look good naked, I might go elsewhere. This training demands fuel for the intensity, and I would NOT want to do this on a calorie deficit, nor would I recommend 2x a week lifting for anyone focused on aesthetics. This program was designed for the ātactical athleteā (I hate that term, but it gets the point across), so anyone not focused on improving that type of multifaceted jack of all trades fitness would probably be better off looking elsewhere.
Overall, this is one of the most successful training blocks Iāve done to date, and I am thrilled with the results. This program works, plain and simple.