The Smartest Special Operations Workout Plan

Out of all the training methods to get faster and stronger for special operations, one has the most science behind it. It’s not block periodization or mashing a marathon and bodybuilding program together. The best way to train for special operations is concurrent training.

It not only beats out all other methods, but the strength and endurance gains you get from doing it may be just as good or better than if you were doing just strength or endurance in isolation.

In this article, I’ll explain what concurrent training is, why it works, common mistakes, and how I personally use it for the athletes I coach.

So What is Concurrent Periodization?

Concurrent training focuses on improving both strength and endurance simultaneously.

Traditionally, it was believed that concurrent training would hinder performance in strength and endurance, especially in intermediate and advanced athletes, due to something called the interference effect. 

The term was coined by a researcher called Hickson in his 1980 study to determine if there was a performance difference between groups that did strength and endurance together, or just strength, or just endurance.

After making gains in the first 6 weeks, the strength and endurance group surprisingly regressed in the final 2. This led him to conclude that adding strength training to an endurance program hurts strength progress. This research seeped into popular culture with common phrases like “running kills your gains” or “strength training makes you slow”.

But more than 40 years later, a 2022 meta-analysis vindicates what I and many other hybrid athlete coaches have practiced. Put simply, when properly structured, training strength and endurance together, can result in the same or even better performance than training each in isolation.

And while smart coaches have known for a long time that heavy strength training improves running performance, economy and reduces injury risk – I mean, there’s a reason why Olympic level marathoners train heavy – what makes this study groundbreaking is that it showed endurance training doesn’t hurt strength performance when set up appropriately.

So, anyone who gives you a weight lifting program and says to stop running because it’ll kill your gains, send them this article.

Why Concurrent Training Works

But while the research shows concurrent training is highly effective, what’s disappointing is how a high percentage of civilians and military personnel make poor progress and crash and burn. More on how to avoid that later in the article. First, let’s talk about why concurrent training works so well, especially in preparing for selection.

Adaptability

When you’re training for selection, especially if you’re cross-training or submitting a package, it’s not practical to plan a 9-month regimen focusing on blocks of just strength or just endurance to peak on exactly one date. With concurrent training, you focus on both at the same time and can easily adapt to the demands of a rigorous or dynamic work schedule.

Consistent Practice

I’ve seen programs focused on endurance where the only thing resembling strength work is high-rep calisthenics. That works if you want to be a runner, but that’s a recipe for failure at selection.

Concurrent training allows you to maintain and build proficiency in strength and endurance simultaneously. This is important because both are critical to your success. In fact, selected candidates are on average, bigger and stronger than those who are not selected. Additionally, high levels of mass are the greatest anthropometric predictor of success, so don’t ignore your strength work.

Increased Compliance

Everyone’s done an intensive running or lifting program. And at some point, grinding away at just one activity day after day and month after month becomes mentally draining. With concurrent training, if your runs are feeling off, you always have your strength or calisthenics workouts to look forward to. It keeps workouts fresh and engaging.

Why Concurrent Training Fails

While I love concurrent training and recommend you do it, there’s no shortage of athletes who try and fail, or who have a self-limiting belief that it’s not possible.

If this sounds like you, here are some potential solutions to why you’re failing.

Stop Training So Much

Imagine you could go back in time and give yourself a training program to follow. Would you create the most elaborate, intense program you could think of? 

Of course, you wouldn’t. The reason why is that one the volume is too high and two even if you could recover from it, you would give up because you didn’t have the mental resilience.

So, if you wouldn’t give that program to your former self, why give it to yourself today?

This behavior is a classic case of self-sabotage. You need a mindset shift to get out of that negative spiral. Remember, it all starts with small wins. You don’t just wake up one day and run 10 miles, you build up to it slowly.

So, if you’re struggling to complete your workout program, cut the volume of every session in half. Do it for a week, and then build up from there.

Stop Biasing Your Training to Your Strengths

Just because it’s concurrent training, doesn’t mean you need to have a 50/50 split between strength and endurance work. If you’re already big and strong, you should bias your training towards endurance work. 

Take Recovery Seriously

First, I will say that If you’re getting good sleep and eating enough, and you’re still feeling destroyed week after week, you’re doing much training. No matter how much you use the ice bath, sleep, and eat, you can’t out-recover too much training volume. There is a physiological limit to what you can recover from.

But if you’re feeling destroyed and getting garbage sleep and eating poor – this a wake-up call. There are guys who can get away with it, in large part likely due to genetics. You’re also probably not that 1 in 100 guy though. It’s not an attack, it’s just the reality.

In the same way that some people are born 7 feet tall, and some people are born 5 feet tall, life is not fair. 99% of you will not be able to train like a beast when you sleep like an insomniac. You need to get 7 hours minimum every night. Prioritize your recovery if you want to get selected.

How To Apply Concurrent Training for Selection

Let’s talk about how I’ve applied concurrent training with my athletes training for special operations and how you can too.

1. Baseline Set of Assessments

Start with a set of baseline assessments to determine your max effort strength, strength endurance, aerobic capacity, and also mid and short-distance running times.

Here’s an example of what a week of assessments would look like

2. Perform an Honest Review of Your Workouts

After you do this assessment, review the outcomes and be honest with yourself. First, are you hitting the bare minimum to get to selection? If not, you need to prioritize the work it takes to just get your foot in the door.

Second, consider what it takes to get selected – a robust aerobic base, fast run and ruck times, and high levels of strength. If there’s one of these in particular you’re weak in, bias your training towards it. 

3. Create The Best Special Operations Training Plan

I recommend keeping at least two strength and three endurance days per week. This is the concurrent aspect of this training.

Here’s a sample workout plan for someone who’s multiple months out from selection and who really needs to work on his strength.

You can see see he’s weightlifting four times per week with moderate volume each session, and he’s running twice and rucking once on the weekends. The average person may look at this routine and think they can do more, and they’re probably right.

But doing more work is not the goal. The goal is to stimulate your body enough to elicit a response to improve, then recover and then repeat. So, just because you can do more work, doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

How to Build Muscle and Run 20+ Miles Per Week

One of the next questions, I get is how you can prioritize building muscle mass on a routine like this, and also run 20 or more miles per week. 

It’s very possible, and here’s how you can go about it. 

Eat enough protein

Most research shows you want to eat about 0.8 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight to optimize muscle growth.

Additionally, to maximize muscle growth, I recommend eating protein-rich foods 4 times throughout the day.

eat in a slight caloric surplus

It’s entirely possible to maintain your current body weight and build muscle and strength while losing fat and getting faster – it’s simpler than you think, especially if you’re newer to training or you have the major aspects of training and recovery dialed in.

But if you want to maximize muscle growth, you want to have a surplus of energy. This means eating more calories than you’re burning every day. I don’t recommend counting calories unless you really want to or you struggle to either gain or lose weight, but here’s a calorie calculator if you’re interested.

Train Hard

The most important aspect of building muscle and making progress is training hard.

You can have the perfect diet, recovery, and supplements from all your favorite influencers, but if you train like a wimp then you’re not going to build muscle.

Bonus Tip

A pro tip on how to make sure your effort is on point is to record your sets at least once every several weeks. If you’re not doing this, there’s a high chance you’re sandbagging your workouts.

The next time you go to the gym, record a set and be honest with yourself about how many more reps you could do. As humans, we’re naturally lazy. You need to build systems to enforce proper effort.

For lifting, this means recording your sets, and for running this means tracking your heart rate over time.

Conclusion

If you follow these steps to build a concurrent training program, you’re guaranteed to make progress.

For those of you who want to take the guesswork out of training and are interested in personalized 1 on 1 coaching, I do take on a select number of athletes based on my availability. If you’re interested, thoroughly fill out the form, and I’ll see if you’re a good fit.

Check out How To BULLET PROOF Yourself For Special Operations to learn my favorite exercises and training routines for selection.