Although these blogs are aimed at obstacle course runners these principles can and should be applied to any training plan.
As Ross Edgley states:
“Be general in your foundations so you can be specific in your goals” –The World’s Fittest Book, 2018.
This ties in perfectly with the third section of my hierarchy of needs for OCR, mentioned in my OCR Training blog, which is Body Weight Training.
Body weight training consists of exercises such as push-ups, pull-ups, chin-ups, squats and lunges. We could add in jump, climb and throw into this equation. This is similar to the Soviet training regime for general physical preparedness- again check out Ross Edgleys book for information on this.
The body weight foundations consist of all the movement involved in a obstacle course race.
- Pull-up/ chin-up – at some point in the race you are going to need to pull yourself up over something, be it a wall, a rope, or anything else those nasty OCR guys can think of.
- Push- up- crawling under the barbed wire and then jumping up onto your feet the other side will require you to push yourself up off the floor.
- Squats- although you may not have to squat with anything during the race, squats make your legs nice and strong also will help with the atlas stone carry/ picking it up, and there is some cross over between the hip extension at the top of a squat and your vertical jump.
- Lunges- these will help strengthen your legs for any of the farmers walks, log carries or drags you need to do during the race.
Now these are your core exercises that should be in your OCR training plan, these will need to be progressed over your training period in order to get stronger and faster. This is the theory of progressive overload, if you keep doing the same repetitions, sets, weight (you may need to progress to weighted persons of these exercises) and intensity you are not going to stress the body into adapting and getting stronger.
An example of progressive overload would be:
If you can perform 3 pull ups for 3 sets in week 1, the next week you would want to do 3 sets of 3 and another set of 1, then week 3 do 3 sets of 3 and 1 set of 2 and week 4 so 4 sets of 3. This is in an ideal world, however progressive overload is not always linear so you may hit a sticking point along the way- this is fine as long as you are always looking to progress.
Once you have the foundations in your OCR training and you have built up a solid foundation of fitness you can then look to add the next stage of the OCR training hierarchy (strength training and then tactical or OCR skill based training) into your training program. More on these to come in future blogs.