Training: Renegade Style

Here’s a quick interview I did recently with my wacky Canadian buddy, Craig Ballantyne.

Craig Ballantyne: What was your workout yesterday?

Jason Ferruggia: I ran a dozen forty yard sprints in the morning, about two hours after breakfast. That was, of course preceded by a pretty good warm up.

At night, six hours later, we did a heavy lower body workout. Before squatting and deadlifting I like to foam roll for about ten minutes and then get in a pretty good dynamic warm up. I like to be dripping with sweat and feeling very loose and “safe” before getting under a heavy load. That’s not a problem at Renegade Gym as it usually gets up to ninety plus degrees during summer workouts and you’re sweating like Patrick Ewing in the fourth quarter after your first warm up set.

We started with five sets of hurdle jumps. After that we worked up to a five rep max on a box squat and then finished with a back off, death set of 20 reps. Then moved on to some shrug pulls for sets of 8-10. Finished up with the neck harness and a few sets of with the Torque Athletic Macebell. At the end of a squat or dead day I lay face down on the floor, resting on my elbows, with my spine in extension for about ten minutes. The Russians believed that doing this helps realign your spine and set everything back in its proper place. I always feel better when I do it.

CB: Remember how that 40 year old guy schooled us in the sled row? What was up with that? How do you train that guy?

JF: That’s my buddy Mark Crook. He’s actually 46, which makes it even more impressive. The thing about Mark is that he never even thinks about his age and would never consider using it as an excuse or a reason why he shouldn’t be in there outworking and out lifting kids twenty years younger than him. And that is one of the reason he has had such great success in the gym.

While he doesn’t think about his age I do. The reality is that his recovery ability isn’t going to be what it used to be. So I try to keep his volume relatively low and stay on him aboot not going to failure and overtraining. He lives to train as hard as humanly possible but I have always tried to instill in him that doing so isn’t always the smartest approach and won’t always yield the fastest results.

I have him do two upper body days and two lower body days and he trains three days per week, so his fourth day spills over to the following week. This system allows for plenty of stimulation while providing an optimal amount of recovery time and you rarely feel beat up or experience any kind of joint stress. He has a bad back from some old injuries so we only load his spine on one of the two lower body days. This gives him a full nine days between squat sessions which is usually enough.

Whatever we are doing, he hits it hard and gets done in 45 minutes.

CB: What is renegade cardio? You know how much I hate that word. Now why’d you have to go and do that?

JF: I know, I know. I hate it as much as you. The only reason I use that word in the title is because most people recognize it whereas they might not know what conditioning or energy systems training means. But the fact of the matter is that Renegade Cardio is not cardio at all. I am showing people what we do at Renegade Gym, where we have never had a treadmill, stationary bike or stairclimber since 1994, yet have always gotten people absolutely shredded time and time again. We prefer to use sleds, Prowlers, sledgehammers, sandbags, battling ropes, jump ropes and bodyweight circuits. Now I know not everyone has access to those implements so I have given you plenty of other options to choose from as well.

Of course, my favorite way to get lean is sprinting which doesn’t require any equipment at all. In Renegade Cardio I cover my favorite sprint workouts and exactly how and when to do them.

Having said all that I realize that some people may still end up being relegated to a stationary bike for one reason or another. So I’ve created some killer workouts with the stationary bike that will help you get ripped without sapping all your strength.

See, here’s something a lot of people don’t realize… The worst thing you can do for your fast twitch muscle fibers is drown them in a pool of lactic acid. Let me explain… When you do intervals on a bike the way most people do and get that intense burning sensation in your legs, you are accumulating a large amount of lactic acid. This is the worst thing you can do if you want to be fast and explosive. Lactic acid turns fast twitch fibers slow. Since the majority of my clients have always been athletes and those that aren’t are usually weekend warriors, I need to avoid this at all costs. So here is how you can do intervals on the bike without getting slower and decreasing your vertical jump and overall power…

Get on the bike and warm up for a minute or so. Then sprint as hard as you can for ten seconds. After the sprint, drop the bike down to the lowest level possible and cruise very slowly until you are up for your next interval. One mistake people make is that they keep the intensity too high on the bike during their active rest interval. This is fine, as are any other interval recommendations, if your main goal is simply to lose fat. But when you need to maintain power you need to keep the hard intervals short and the easy intervals veeeerrrrry easy. Just high enough to keep your heart rate up above normal.

Over time if you want more variety you can work up to twenty second intervals but the second you start accumulating lactic acid you need to immediately hop off the bike and jump rope or do jumping jacks for a minute until you flush the lactic acid. If the gym you are in allows it I prefer to sprint for ten seconds on the bike then jump rope for a minute and continue in this fashion for 15-20 minutes. This is far more effective than typical steady state cardio and will not decrease your speed or jumping ability.