I would like your opinion on Strend and whether you think it represents true fitness. See www.strend.com for details but basically you counts reps for 5 events; Bench Press, Pull-up, Military press, Chin up and dips. Each event you have 3 minutes to complete your reps and rest before the next event. Then you are timed for 3 miles. To compute your strend factor you divide total reps by the running time. The bench and press are body weight and there are strict guidlines for grip width and forms…
As an example the current record holder has a strend factor of 11.09, which included benching his weight 34 times and 75 dips along with 18:56 for 3 miles.
I find this incredable and would like to know what you think as well as some training advice.
I agree with Natt. The Strend is not a bad contest but I think we have access to more overall fitness here just reading this site. Right now I’m using one of Staley’s programs and sprinting (well, 90% effort) 200 meters X 6, 3 times a week at 50 yrs. old. I think that fast cardio is better than 3 mi. of running, although a 6 min. pace is really good for that distance.
When I rowed at this one club we had a test where we took the # of metres we go go in 10min on the erg, subtract off the # of chinups we could do, the # of situps we could do in 60 sec, the # of pushups we could do in 60 sec & the time it took us to run 8k. The person with the highest total number was in the best shape, I can’t remember what my number was but one year I was 2nd. Not surprisingly (now anyway) it turned out that the results test didn’t mean much when we got into the boats. I guess it was similar to that Strend thing, I think something like that favours people who do lots of cardio & upper-body stuff.
He is also only 143 pounds. It would be interesting to see what their three lift totals are. I also agree that there is a lot of emphasis on the upper body.
what you just said is ridiculous. If you throw in squats that would be a great training alternative to do every few weeks. I would like to see you do 75 dips in three minutes by the way.
Seems like a cool program. Not sure if it’s a good test of strength though. I think it would be better if they used the benchpress, squat, deadlift, pushpress, pull ups, dips and then the running. But alas, it’s not my program.
The ad hominem attack makes you look like an idiot. I went to the web page and it basically says that good total fitness is based upon upper body STRength and cardiovascular ENDurance. The founder was Delta Force and makes the presumption that military fitness = total fitness. This whole argument becomes a matter of opinions because it’s asking to quantify fitness without any objectives.