Base Building

I came across the Tactical Barbell books about a year ago and enjoyed reading them but never actually ran one of the programs, although I did loosely try to incorporate some the approaches from the conditioning book.  Given I want to run a program that will still allow me to make strength gains but has a structured running component they seem like an ideal fit for my goals.  In particular I am interested in running the Green Protocol book phases this year, but want to try a smaller block of training first to see how it works for me before I embark upon a 9-month training journey. The Base Building phase described in Tactical Barbell II seems like an ideal way to give the system a try in a manner that is consistent with my goals.  Base building is an 8 week program template designed to build an aerobic and endurance base that can serve as the foundation for later training phases.  It starts with 5 weeks of strength endurance (SE) work alongside zone 2cardio, followed by 3 weeks of max strength (MS) sessions and a mix of HIIT and zone 2 cardio.  Base Building requires that you select exercise clusters to fill out the template. 

For the SE portion of the training I have decided to use the following 4 exercises:

• Dips
• Inverted Rows
• Goblet Squats
• KB Swings

and will run those exercises alongside zone 2 runs and rucks, where at least one zone 2 session each week will be a ruck with a 40-pound vest.

For the MS sessions I’m going to use the cluster of:

• Bench Press
• Weighted Pullups
• Back Squats
• 50 KB swings as a finisher

For the Zone 2 cardio I intend to use 60 minutes as the minimum session length for the “short run” days and 2 hours as the “long run” session minimum.  Now that the winter weather forecast looks manageable to regularly run outside again – here we go!