I’ve wrapped up the Surge Challenge, here is my review: (I’m nitpicky, don’t view any criticisms as a negative - rather critiques. I just want to be thorough in my review.)
To expand on this… I think the Surge Challenge would work great for people who need to get into the gym more often, or for people who need to expand their spectrum of training (always a good thing). It most certainly was an interesting experience, and I felt good after my training sessions - which was a nice change from feeling completely broken off after training (my usual). The pumps were good, I enjoyed the shoulder and triceps pumps because they still felt pumped when I was done.
The Bar Hang in the shoulders block feels misplaced to me and I substituted it for a “Clean Hold” (clean the bar up to shoulder-height and hold it for 40s); this felt better IMO and still worked the shoulders in a stretched position.
The Lats block didn’t really work for me as written, so I had to add some stuff to it (a common occurrence, my lats are uncooperative albeit wide and chunky).
I struggle to do high reps for anything in Biceps, where the concentric motion gets significantly weaker - yet I’m able to continue with long eccentrics after. This made the biceps block difficult for me… I wanted to do more weight but couldn’t increase due to inability to lift it (lol). This is just a “me” problem though.
I did notice in re-programming this challenge for @Shaina_Madel (wife) that the leg and thigh blocks really neglects the hamstrings. For me, I was happy about this because I strongly dislike training hammies - but this is an imbalance in the training… not a problem for short-term use, but would certainly need to be rectified if used in the long-run.
My biggest complaint about the program is simply that it is very difficult to execute in a commercial gym. Actually rather time-consuming to execute at a home gym too (and I’m pretty well equipped there), but this is from set-up time. I did not finish a single training session in under 45 minutes, but I was at least able to complete the training blocks (mostly) as prescribed.
All in all, I’d give this challenge am 8/10 and I’d give Surge a 9/10.
Now that I am done with the Surge Challenge, I will be moving on to a bastardized 5/3/1 and DoggCrapp training hybrid under the following plan:
