Who doesn’t want a furry Viking helmet?

Over the past couple of years, obstacle course races such as the Warrior Dash have become insanely popular.  Since I first posted about training for the Warrior Dash on my personal training website, I’ve gotten a lot of inquiries from clients and other trainers about how exactly one should train for the Warrior Dash or similar short distance obstacle course races.  I’ve heard people tout everything from Crossfit to P90X to not training at all as being the best way to train for one of these races, but I believe there is a middle ground that can serve far more people, especially beginners, without getting too extreme or requiring a lot of equipment.  Obviously, the best training protocol is tailored for the individual, but with a little information, its relatively easy to tweak a program for your own needs and fitness level.

The first time I saw a video of the Warrior Dash on Youtube, I thought to myself, “Those people are crazy.”

Farmers walks are a highly underrated exercise for back and grip strength as well as postural endurance.

It immediately occurred to me that this would be an ideal event to give to my clients as a training goal.  I was quite sure that all of them could, at the very least, complete the race.  A lot of my clients are my age or older and mainly train to maintain or improve their quality of life.  To me, this means making them strong and giving them a good base of power and endurance to get through their daily routines while still having some gas in the tank to play with their kids or whatever other activities they engage in.  I typically train folks with barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells, and odd objects such as tires, ropes, sleds, sledgehammers, etc.  Our workouts consist of focused strength or power training followed by general conditioning work.  Although a lot of them can’t do a single pullup, they can hang from a bar and do farmers walks with considerable weight so their grip strength is good which is what is needed for climbing over cargo nets or objects with ropes.  Therefore the only thing left to train was the actual distance, some obstacle specific movements, and the transitions between running and obstacles.    

So, lets say you are used to walking or jogging at a moderate or pathetic pace, but every time you try and push yourself to go faster, you end up with a stitch in your side, or just plain worn out before you go the distance. Pacing intervals are designed to help you increase your intensity over time until you can maintain your new intensity for the entire duration of your run/bike/swim/row, etc.
For example, using a rate of perceived exertion scale, you are used to running at an intensity level of 5 on a scale from 1-10 with 1 being walking through the mall and 10 being close to death. You want to increase your pace such that the distance you run in 45 minutes is longer. To do this outright, you could just sprint. But after about 2-3 minutes, you would be lying on the side of the road, possibly vomiting.
Instead, try increasing the pace and/or intensity at which your run a set time or distance and then rest for a set period of time before repeating. If you were on a treadmill, let’s say you are used to jogging at 4.5 miles per hour. To use pacing intervals, try increasing the speed to 5.5 mph for 2-4 minutes (don’t push yourself to failure or you won’t be able to complete the workout). Walk or jog to recover for 1-2 minutes.Repeat this interval for the normal duration of your run. If you don’t rest too much, the immediate result is that you will have covered more distance. In the meantime, your muscles will have adapted to the higher demand for fuel and will start generating more mitochondria. Your respiratory and cardiovascular systems will respond to the increased demands for more oxygen and become more efficient. Over time, you will want to extend the length of the intervals until you are running the entire distance/time at the higher pace.  

Even marathoners had to start running one mile at a time.

So, the typical way in which I worked with my beginners was to have them run 400 meter increments of 1-2 miles with a 2 minute full rest, either walking or just standing between efforts.   We would typically do this at the end of a training session.  At least once a week, we would walk/run a full 3 mile distance and would gradually increase the distances we were running until we worked up to running the whole distance with only one or two breaks.

Now, my clients were relatively strong, but only about half of them could do a pullup or squat their bodyweight.  Here’s the good news.  You don’t have to be able to do a pullup or squat your bodyweight to complete an obstacle course race.  Most of the climbing involves using both your arms and your legs and/or using a rope to pull yourself up and over an obstacle while pushing yourself over with your legs.  So, although grip strength and the ability to hang from a bar will benefit you, you are more likely to benefit from being able to pull about half your bodyweight up a rope.  The more extreme races have monkey bars across relatively large bodies of water or pits of mud, but even monkey bars don’t require a pullup so much as a flexed arm hang.

A strength endurance circuit of lunges, kettlebell swings, situps, and pushups.  (Yes, I was making them pose.)

So, what kind of strength work do we need?  Its a good question and depends on the individual, but you want all your participants to have a good base of strength such that they can maintain their posture through a variety of tasks.  This requires strength endurance more than anything else and can be trained primarily with lighter resistance training or even just bodyweight training. You also want exercises that are going to support your running, climbing, and crawling over and under the various obstacles.  A little flexibility doesn’t hurt either.   Lunges, squats, body rows, bear crawls, step ups, curls and presses, pushups, and whatever kind of core training you can imagine will all help your efforts.  Its easy enough to combine 4-6 exercises in a circuit of 15-20 reps of each for 4-6 rounds for a full body strength endurance workout.  As you get closer to your race, you can start combining these strength exercises with your running efforts.

For example:
Run 1 mile
Perform 20 lunges on each leg and 20 pushups
Run 400 meters
Perform 20 squats and 20 body rows
Run 400 meters
Bear crawl 30 meters
V-sit Russian twist, 20 reps to each side
Run 400 meters
Perform 20 weighted step ups and 20 kettlebell or dumbbell windmills, each side
Run 400 meters
Jump over fire (just kidding, save that for race day)

Tires are very useful.  If using them for box jumps, be careful to step back down and not jump, especially if you are a beginner.

If you want to get a little more intense with your training and you don’t have a lot of equipment, get an old tractor or 18 wheeler tire (they are free if you can find a tire place that changes off road tires) and practice flipping it, dragging it with a rope, doing step-ups or jumping onto it, doing pushups off of it, or hitting it with a sledgehammer.

If you want to get a little more specific, the over/under obstacles are a good one to train specifically for.  Another tool that will help you with the over under obstacles and overall flexibility is a split rail fence.  Yup, go over and under it.  The typical height is about 3-4 feet.  If you don’t have one, get four bales of straw.  stack two on top of each other, place the other two about 4 feet apart and put a length of PVC pipe or a broomstick across it.  Climb over the stacked hay bales by placing your hands on top and swinging your legs under.  Move under the pipe by getting low or, if you have a more substantial bar or board, swing yourself under it.  Repeat.

Right before crossing the finish line.

The last component is a willingness to get completely filthy and cold.  You’re not just going to get muddy, you’re going to be getting wet in yucky ponds that are full of who knows what and are typically a lot colder than the air.  I ran my first Warrior Dash in October and because my legs went numb halfway across the log-filled pond, I ended up diving over the remaining two logs before climbing out of the muck.  I don’t mind being filthy, but you definitely don’t want that stuff getting in your mouth.

At the completion of the first Warrior Dash I did with my group, all of us finished it, and all of us ran the whole thing.  Some members of our group even set some impressive times.  We were all filthy, banged up, some of us had a few cuts from the mud and gravel (and from grabbing a hold of the barbed wire, its not fake), but overall we felt good, no one was terribly sore after the fact, and we all had a great time