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Look good, feel good, be capable.
Without letting training consume your life.
A free example training week, programmed the way I program for myself. Then a twelve-week block that takes you from lifter only to lifter plus runner.
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What you get
The free week
- It is what I would program for a client if I had one, or for a friend who wanted to do what I do.
- What shows up is the session, and a few sentences about why it is set up the way it is.
The Switch
- A more detailed version of the free week, with progressions and deloads.
- Twelve weeks that take you from lifter only to lifter plus runner, and leave you knowing what you are doing.
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Who this is written for
- You love training hard.
- You want to start running, or get better at it, without tanking your gym gains.
- You already do both, and you want to understand the programming better: sequencing, rest, and why.
- You want a high VO2 max, and to be muscular and strong.
Not for you if
- You are just getting into training.
- Aesthetics are your primary goal. You will look better from this program, but there are more efficient ways to do that.
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How the training is built
- Hard sessions are stacked together, so your body can recover on the easy days.
- Easy days stay easy and hard days stay hard.
- At a minimum you maintain the muscle you have, or build it if you are less advanced in the gym, while getting much more aerobically fit.
- Your tolerance to the load from running goes up along the way, and that load can be more than most gym-goers expect.
- Every session can be cut in half or swapped for a walk, and that still counts as done. An unplanned day off is fine, and it has never held back any progress.
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The free week
A week of training I would program for a friend. One email a day with the session and a few lines on why.
Day 1 through Day 7
- Run1
- Both2
- Rest3
- Both4
- Run5
- Run6
- Rest7
Day 1 arrives the next morning, so it is there when you are up.
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Questions
Will running kill my lifting?
No, that is a common misconception. High mileage makes it harder to be remarkably strong in the gym, but it does not rule out gym progress and it does not cost you muscle by default. It is possible to be muscular and a runner at the same time.
I only have three hours a week.
You can still do a lot. This plan may not be scripted exactly for you, but it shows you how to adapt it to the schedule you have. Ideally you would have more than three hours a week to train, but that is not life.
I have never run.
You can certainly benefit from this plan. Most people start too fast. They look up a marathon program and go from nothing to thirty miles a week, and the overuse injury risk is too high. This plan is built on smooth, gradual progressions that still get you where you want to go in a short time, without the risk of a vanilla program written for somebody already far more advanced in running.
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Who wrote this
I'm McKinley. I have tried everything, so I know a good deal about different training modalities. I understand risk and reward better than most people in the fitness industry. Part of my background is in data science and risk modeling, so I approach training from that lens too. I tested the trade-offs of doing more, doing less, and which exercises in what order, and landed on something that lets you train hard without spinning your wheels or overtraining.
