From Sloth to Spartan in 100 Days: Week 2 Day 8 – 14

Welcome to Week 2 of S2S100 Training Program. If you’re new to the program be sure to check out my intro article and catch up by following Week 1 Training.

Essentially, this is a Spartan Race training guide. More specifically, this is how I’m going to train for my Spartan Beast race in July.  This is my training program for you to follow along as well.

This training will definitely help you prepare for other events such as Spartan Sprint, Super Spartan, Warrior Dash, Tough Mudder and many others.

This week the program follows the same routine as Week 1:

  • 5 workout days
  • train a different muscle group on different days
  • cardio follows strength training

Workouts for Week 2 Day 8 – 14

Daily training snapshot:

  • Monday: Chest and Triceps, Cardio
  • Tuesday: Legs
  • Wednesday: Core
  • Thursday: Back and Biceps, Cardio
  • Friday: Shoulders, Cardio
  • Saturday and Sunday: Off

Get the printer friendly version at the bottom of the article.  There are plenty of new exercises for you to learn.

Strength training

Each strength training session will start off with compound exercise consisting of 7-9 sets.  The goal here is to exhaust the whole muscle group so that when you perform subsequent exercises you utilize all muscles in that group to execute the reps.

I suggested a range of reps you should do, but you’re probably going to ask, is how  much weight should you do? Answer: lift enough weight to perform the minimum of the set range, but heavy enough that you’ll struggle to move it on the final rep or two.

Cardio

During Week 2 your cardio intensity will start ramping up.

  1. Set timer for 20 minutes
  2. Set the treadmill at 1% incline
  3. Set your comfortable jogging speed. One that you can easily keep pace with for 20 minutes.
  4. Every minute increase speed by .1 … so if you started at 7.0, the next minute will increase to 7.1, the following minute would be at 7.2 and so on. It looks like this:
    • Minute 20: 7.0
    • Minute 19: 7.1
    • Minute 18: 7.2
    • Minute 17: 7.3
    • …. and on
  5. Follow this format for all cardio sessions for the rest of the week.

How’s this going to help you build up your cardio? Well there’s a method here.

Every week you’ll be starting your treadmill speed a .1 high than previous. So you could slowly build up your speed and endurance over time.  Below is  my progress chart overtime.  For the most part, I’ve spent only 20 minutes on the treadmill. Ignore the spikes and dips as this is due to time spent on the treadmill. But overall my speed has been gradually improving. I was able to cover more distance and burn more calories. But more importantly my speed and endurance increased dramatically.

average running speed progress chart

We won’t be doing this type of cardio throughout the whole training program. There will be other cardio training methods involved, such as cycling, running outdoors, tabata and more. Lastly, if you absolutely hate the treadmill, then get on  the bike or an elliptical. You can apply the same training protocol to those exercises as well.

Nutrition

This week I’ll still point you to my nutrition rules.  I won’t ask you to make drastic changes to your diet, unless you feel very ambitious.  But if you were to make one significant change this week, it would be to replace all your drinks with water.  Get rid of juices, pop, alcohol and other calorie heavy liquids.

This is it for Week 2. Good luck and have fun.

Download the printer friendly version of exercises here. I’ve hyperlinked some exercises to instruction videos or images. Before you print it, be sure you watch check them out first.