Greasing the Groove

Monday is Progression Testing day for my system, I do one or two light sets early and then spend the day spacing out progression test cycles.

Today I've done:

09:00 light warmup

10:30 I progress tested the frog leg lifts. 3 sets of 30. Didn't have any difficulty making the standard, did surprise myself a bit as the first set I'd done last Monday evening was a little rough. Purely subjective, but I'm feeling like the GTG approach is working.

11:15 I progress tested on the straight bridges- Didn't make the progression standard, but did 3 sets of 30 (standard is 3 sets of 40). This is good, as I have an area to track progress in for a longer period.

13:00 I progress tested the half pushups. Hard, but doable. 2 sets of 25. Remember, the slow pace is a big part of this- I can pop out that many sloppy military fitness test pushups in a minute. the sets of 25 were closer to two minutes of work each.

I could hang back and work this level a bit more, but I'm going to go ahead and move to full pushups and milk that phase for a while. My arms are a bit stubby and the half pushups I'm doing, using a smaller ball, are closer to the full pushups prescribed in the next phase.


I'm going to update later, I need to get several hours of recovery time in before I do the jacknife pull ups. I'll go ahead and do squats at some point after, though I'm not expecting much difficulty with them, and am not worried about being a bit blown when I do the standard.


On a purely subjective basis - I have noticed a definite increase over the past 3 weeks in my 'comfort strength'- to the point where I'm having to be significantly more cautious than previously in some tasks. This isn't a "get off the couch" program for me, I've been working out since July, so I'm a bit surprised by the dramatic level of the general, overall strength increase.

I've been at this GTG style adaptation for over 3 weeks now, and I'm told that it's going to be too much to maintain, but thus far I'm not feeling like that is the case. I may be going slower at developing pull up strength than I otherwise would if I had a dedicated Naked Warrior style program for pull ups exclusively. It is simply my weakest area and I can't really tell if that's the case.

There's a built in balance, I think, in the CC program. In Naked Warrior, the focus is designed to be purely on max strength, though there will be some endurance gain from the frequency of the workouts. With Convict Conditioning it appears that beginning a new step in any one of the big 6 will promote a phase of rapid strength gain, with a following cycle of endurance gains. (Not that it's a 100% shift, there will obviously be a ratio that changes, never hitting 0 in either area.)

Truth is that in many of the areas I'm not putting much stress on the body or muscles just yet- and as that grows the reps go down, so I'm going to continue with this program for now and if I need to back off to 1 set done 3 times a day versus 2 sets done three times a day at some point, I will.