Jocko Underground: Are You Doing Too Much? How Do You Even Know?
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- This is the Jocko Underground Podcast number 167. Sitting here with Echo Charles about to answer some questions that have been submitted and provide some courses of action, some possible guidance, some recommendations.

actionable steps. We'll see. We'll get to some actionable steps as well. Sure. Okay. First question. First inquiry. I attended an Echelon Front roll call event and I have been on the path ever since. For the past few years, I've been waking up every morning to get to the gym and will lift for an hour to an hour and a half of a bodybuilding style routine with most sets to failure. Shout out to Echo for that advice.

I've been seeing great results with this style program. During my time on the path, I've done 75 hard and I have maintained most of the disciplines from that program. The program consists of two workouts a day. One has to be outdoors, drink a gallon of water, maintain a diet and reading. My second workout usually consists of a fast paced walk or rock.

I would like to increase the intensity of my second workout. I've started running three and a half miles three times a week. I was wanting to implement some Metcon style workouts or using some of the workouts from Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. My concern is about overtraining, especially since I'm approaching 40. Would this be too much volume? What kinds of workouts would you recommend to help my cardio and with my mental toughness? Thank you in advance. And thank you for all the wisdom you have passed on.

- Well, I think you're a pretty good example 'cause you incorporated Metcons into your workout later in life. You were probably over 40, huh? When you did that? - Yeah, about this point. - Really about this point? - Yeah, if not, then right before. - And I think they're definitely beneficial for a bunch of reasons, but one thing that you can do when you want to incorporate these things is if you're really using them for cardio and for that,

fueling system of cardio, which isn't an endurance three and a half mile run, which is a different fueling system. Anything that you like, there's a bunch of things that you can do and body doing like lightweight, easy, quote unquote, easy movements.

Like a burpee, right? A burpee. You can always do another burpee. Yeah. Like you can literally always do one more burpee no matter what. You're never going to not be able to do a burpee, realistically speaking. Right. Jumping jacks. Like you're not going to get muscle failure on the jumping jacks. Yeah.

some level of plyometrics, right? Like you can do plyometrics and look, can you burn yourself out on plyo? Yeah, you can. But even if you're just doing jumps, you know, jumps over the bar, just little jumps, things like that, jumping rope, right? You can kind of always do a little bit more jumping rope. And then you get to things like the air bike, things like the rower, where you're not extremely taxing your muscles, right?

in a way where you're gonna get muscle fatigue. In this particular case, in my opinion, tell me what you think, you're not looking for muscle fatigue, you're looking for muscle usage that fails due to cardio. That's not failing due to muscular failure. And I think what you could do in a situation like this is you could start off by doing really short bursts of super high intense exercise

but low weight work, you know, even if it's just like 20 seconds or 30 seconds of all you got on an air bike or 30 seconds of as many burpees you can possibly do.

And then rest until you're ready again. Like take a legit rest. And then just over time, make that rest a little shorter, make the work a little longer. And eventually you'll get to a point where you're getting some, even the first one, you'll get really good work. You go to two minutes of burpees as hard as you can. I don't care who you are. If you do them as hard as you can, you're going to be freaking tired. Yeah.

30:00 CH: Cardio tired. Now listen, if you're not muscularly strong, you can work your legs. If your legs aren't strong, your legs will get tired too. But eventually, you can maybe, if you want, you can add a load. You can start throwing a kettlebell swing in there. You can do something that, again, we're looking for a sustainable weight that you can do many, many times.

And then you can add that over time and you can start doing things like kettlebell swings, maybe some light, you know, cleans or snatches with a kettlebell. These things are, they shouldn't be, you're not going super heavy, especially in the beginning, but you're using them to get your cardio activities going. And then, you know, over time you just decrease the, decrease the, the, the rest time and or,

increase the amount of time that you do something for and or increase the reps that you do something and or Increase the weight that you're doing and those are a bunch of ways that you can start to add some met calm it's a Metcon activities into your workouts and I think if you're aiming for like eventually you're getting to between 5 and 15 minutes of Really high intensity work maybe with some breaks in there, you know if you're doing

that are three or four minutes long and you're doing three or four of those rounds or you're doing five minutes straight or something like that and you can get to a point where you're gonna get some really good cardio work and you'll feel that. Is this guy doing jujitsu? I don't think he's doing jujitsu, but you'll feel it in situate. Like you'll feel your cardio get better for these short burst things. And by the way, that will help your three and a half mile runs. It will. You'll get stronger and faster all along. So that's kind of my assessment here. But then what we have to pay attention to because the actual question that you had was,

or the statement that you made is you don't want to overtrain. So I think you're going to be able to get away with more of this than you might think because it truly is just looking to tax your system in a very specific mode, not your endurance mode and not your explosive weightlifting mode. Your goal is to not be sore the next day.

like muscularly sore the next day. That's not the goal. The goal is that you work that metabolic region of work and you stress it out so that it becomes stronger and stronger over time. Yeah, it's true.

Without going too deep into the it depends realm, because it does. It depends on how much volume you're doing, because even when you say lift for an hour, whatever, it depends like what lifting, you know. I like Metcon, but I started Metcon for a reason, just so I wouldn't be dying in the later rounds in jiu-jitsu. So there was like a reason tethered to it. You know, it wasn't Metcon just so I can get in quote-unquote better shape arbitrarily. I don't...

it starts to become hard to answer any question when you don't have a reason why you're getting in shape or whatever. Especially like Metcon. Metcon is like a performance scenario. You know? It's like, because there's better ways to get cut up than doing Metcons. Yeah, for sure.

Mm. Metcons are good though. I'm not. Well, yeah. I mean, depends on what you mean by good. Depends on who you are. Depends on where you're ultimately going, you know, but yeah, if you want to maintain or grow muscle and lose body fat and Metcons are not that good, really, you know, especially when you compare it to the good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so it just depends on what we're doing. Um, I like Metcon for the performance. So now, now when you go do jujitsu, when you do hiking, mountain climbing, you got to, you know, playing with the kids, all that stuff, all, it all becomes a lot easier and you can do more of it. So that's good. Um,

To me, the mile, the cardio stuff, even super low intensity is good. So don't get too crazy with it all of a sudden. Yeah, yeah, don't get too crazy. You know one thing, if he's running three and a half miles three times a week, one thing that you could put into this, and I don't know if I specifically mentioned it, but sprinting. Sprinting is awesome. And you do, you know, do 440s, you know? It doesn't take much time at all.

but you'll get faster and you're, and then you start doing six forties and then you start doing eight forties. And then at some point you're doing 10 forties and it takes you with, with a, with a rest in there. And now it takes you 10, 15 minutes and you're getting some really good work and that's going to benefit you all across the board. It's not the same and you're not going to feel the same way you'll feel when you do

100 burpees for time, which is different. But again, I guess when we talk Metcon, we're talking 100 burpees for time. But the sprinting will prepare you for that as well. Yeah. So I would say to answer the question of is this too much volume? It is.

If you do too much too quickly, it'll become too much volume. Yeah. But like, just like how you kind of laid out there as an example, where if it's like you just do, actually, I would even go less approaching 40 years old. I would do this. I'm going to add some sprints. I would do like four sprints once a week.

Start with mm-hmm for literally 40 yards rest 40 yards rest 40 yards and I'll say this do it after your after your run Yeah, and the reason is because I want you warmed up, dude. I don't want you going out there I'm freaking a lot of hammy because 40 year old dudes blow hammies like and Achilles like it so that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko underground podcast so if you want to continue to listen and

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