I’ve found that the choice of what workout to perform can be difficult. There’s so many different workouts out there, each of them claiming to have benefits over every other one. It’s like eating in that fashion; everyone has their opinion of what you should be eating and what you should be avoiding like the plague.

I’ve been researching various workouts to find one that matches my needs. I did a round of a modified P90X routine consisting of the resistance-based P90X routines with my running routine replacing the aerobic portions. I had good success but it was time for a change. The drawbacks of P90X for me personally were:

• The workouts are relatively long. For someone trying to fit a workout in at lunch this is a drawback. The typical day is roughly an hour and 15 minutes including abs.
• Some of the movements are either awkward or of dubious benefit. To me it seems they were stretching a bit to fill in the workouts.
• More personally, my “workout space” at home is a shared space that usually requires clearing out to work out. That’s a pain.

My goals whittled down the competition. It’s obviously quite important to pick a workout that suits your goals. My goals are finding a workout that compliments my running training, that works towards overall body fitness and “leaning up” rather than building mass. The workout should be reasonably brief but at a fairly high intensity. Ideally it should also not require a bunch of specialized equipment and be something I could do at my gym.

Enter the Spartacus Workout

There are lots of what I’ll term “fad workouts” out there. There’s the 300 workout, the Spartacus Workout, and a myriad of others. I don’t mean that as disparagingly as it sounds. The simple fact is all of these health magazines have to earn their money and capitalize on crazes. Hence, tons to choose from. I took a look at a lot of them and the Spartacus Workout resonated most clearly. At its core its simply a circuit training regimen. 3 sets of 10 exercises performed in sequence with continuous reps for 1 minute with 15 seconds of recovery in between exercises, with 2 minutes of recovery between sets. Sounds like a mouthful but read it a couple of times if it’s not clear. Total workout time is around 42 minutes which is right in my wheel house.

The exercises selected are as follows (and illustrated here):

The Original Spartacus Workout

1. Goblet squats
2. Mountain climbers
3. Single-arm dumbbell swings
4. T-pushups
5. Split jumps
6. Dumbbell rows
7. Dumbbell side lunge and touch
8. Pushup-position row
9. Dumbbell lunge and rotation
10. Dumbbell press

That’s a fairly adventurous full-body workout depending on the weight selected and the reps performed. However, to my eye it seems heavy on legs and lower back and a bit light for chest, back, and especially biceps. Here’s my modified version that attempts to add a bit more balance and address these perceived shortcomings.

The Spartacus Workout Evolved

1. Goblet squats
2. Mountain climbers
3. Single-arm dumbbell swings
4. T-pushups
5. Standard grip pullups / Wide grip pullups / Narrow grip chinups
6. Standard pushups / Diamond pushups / Wide pushups / Incline pushups
7. Dumbbell side lunge and touch / Split jumps
8. Pushup-position row
9. Dumbbell lunge and rotation
10. Dumbbell press

The changes hit at station 5. We’re swapping out split jumps for one of my personal favorite back exercises, pullups. You can choose any of the three types listed per set, so mix it up. I’d recommend doing your least favorite in the first set when you’re at your strongest. With this one change we’ve done a world of good with back and biceps. Be sure to work in a set of chinups — palms facing you — in order to activate those biceps.

Station 6 switches from the relatively anemic dumbbell rows to pushups. There’s no reason you can’t mix dumbbell rows in on occasion as they do activate a different part of the back, but we’re already getting rows in station 8. Pushups are just a good exercise. They hit core, they hit triceps, they hit chest. Now we’ve addressed the shortcomings of the workout as I saw them.

Station 7 I’ve given you a choice between the side lunges and the split jumps. Split jumps are awesome so I didn’t want to get rid of them completely, but something had to give and the original routine was slightly leg-heavy.

So that’s it! Do this routine 3 times a week. I’ll be doing this routine 3 times a week interspersed with my running days on 3 other days with one day of rest.

I’ve done this one a few times and it’s a really good, efficient, full-body workout that should work to lean and strengthen and get that heartrate up for a while. If you have similar goals as me give it a shot and let me know what you think.

Right now I’m bumping up against the ceiling in my performance on various workouts. I don’t have any more aerobic or muscular capacity to get more gains in speed. I can improve my aerobic and muscular capacity which is a long-term goal, obviously, but if I’m going to make the kind of drastic gains necessary to reach Boston, I have to find another way to improve and that’s running economy. I’ve never really thought about running form much before. But now that I’m trying to become a faster runner I have to start looking at every aspect of my running and find those areas that I can improve if I’m going to reach my goals. Thankfully, I know precisely where I’m starting from: I’m a plodder. I make no bones about it.

I remember being amazed when I realized that one of the songs on my usual heavy playlist synchronized perfectly with my typical running gate. Slipknot’s Wherein Lies Continue popped up and my feet just meshed of their own accord instantly.

That song is approximately 156 BPM, making that my typical running stride. Frankly, not atypical for the average recreational runner apparently. The vast majority of elite runners — and possibly all of them — by contrast have an average stride rate of right around 180 per minute. That higher stride rate yields considerably more efficiency than my slower, plodding rate. Think about it this way: the more strides per minute for a particular pace the shorter the distance between each stride. That shorter distance per stride can be achieved with a stride that is lower to the ground so that you don’t have to put as much spring upwards into each stride to make the foot go that distance in the air. That extra spring upwards required for taking the longer stride is wasted energy. That’s energy that I expend just to run at that pace whereas if I increase my stride rate I’ll expend less energy to go the same pace. Put even more simply, I can work less for the same pace, or I can increase my pace with the same energy expenditure. Also, that foot has to land at some point, too. Which do you think is harder on the body, landing from lower in the air from a shorter stride or landing from higher in the air after a longer stride? Yes, shorter stride wins again.

Here’s where I need to be. Eric Johnson’s Cliffs of Dover is right around 182 BPM.

I know what I need to do, how do I get there?

This will be a hard change. That stride rate is pretty well ingrained at this point. My stride rate is intimately involved in my breathing rate. It’s just natural. So I’ll have to improve slowly. There are some drills to improve stride rate that you can find described in great detail elsewhere. And I’ll start working those in at the beginning of workouts.

I’ve also got some supporting material loaded up on the Clip+. If you haven’t heard of the Podrunner podcasts, go take a look. Hour long techno mixes at specific BPMs. I have every mix from 156 all the way up to 180 loaded up on the Clip+. So as I’m running, I’m going to work up the BPM playlist a little bit at a time, working to become comfortable with 3-5 BPM faster per week. A gradual improvement. Let my body get used to it as I go.

Got my long run today. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Back in January I started doing P90X. Well, let me rephrase that. I added P90X workouts to my workout regimen and created a kind of hybrid P90X/FIRST marathon training program. I didn’t do the aerobic workouts espoused by P90X because I was already doing my 3 running workouts a week. I used the upper-body workouts of P90X to primarily tone up and lose weight, and I didn’t use the leg workouts because, frankly, my legs weren’t responding well and I didn’t want to injure myself before the Shamrock Marathon. I wasn’t shooting for being “ripped” or getting extreme, I wanted a decent workout. P90X delivered that, although I have since switched to circuit training in the gym with several exercises inspired by P90X still in the mix. I just got bored with the same workouts in my bonus room.

One thing I took a shine to was pull-ups. I bought a pull-up bar off eBay. You’ll want to be careful about which kind you buy, as there are some made with lighter gauge steel that I wouldn’t trust. The one I ended up with is stout and heavy. I’ve added some felt around the ends that touch the doorway to limit the damage that it does. It works flawlessly. Having so many grip positions is fantastic. Mixing things up is simple.

So now I find myself doing pull-ups and chin-ups at random times during the day. When I have a free minute I’ll head upstairs to where the bar is and do a set of pushups. Any kind will do: standard, wide, diamond, decline. Do a set to failure. Then pick a grip and do a set of pull-ups or chin-ups. Mix up your sets: reverse grip, wide grip, hammer grip. That’s it. 1 minute and you’re done with both. On an average day I’ll get maybe 40 extra pull-ups and 100 to 200 pushups sprinkled throughout the day.

Pull-ups are fantastic upper body exercises, but they’re hard. “I can’t do a single pull-up! How am I going to do this?” When I first got my bar earlier this year it was my weakest exercise. On standard width, front-grip pull-ups I could maybe do 2 with anything approaching correct form. Reverse-grip chin-ups are easier and I could do perhaps 5. Now I’m up to over 10 of any kind. So, how do you improve if you can’t do any? 2 primary ways:

1. Work the negative. If you can’t pull yourself up even once, use your legs and push with your legs or jump to the top to the finishing position. Then let yourself down slowly. By going slowly downward — “working the negative” — you’ll work the same muscles. Eventually you’ll be able to pull yourself up.
2. Do “assisted” pull-ups. Get a chair and put it in front of you when you’re standing at the bar. Grip the bar and use one leg to help yourself pull up to the top. Only use as much leg as you need. Need to increase the difficulty? Move the chair a bit further away. You can use this chair to increase the number of reps you perform as well. When I first started I would do as many as I could without the chair, then use the chair to get an extra few reps.

Combine those and soon you’ll see incremental improvement. And you’ll definitely notice a difference in your arms and back.