1000 Sprawls

In the middle of a Sprawl or Squat Thrust

I got excited!

With the website being back up and training going very well I got jacked up the other night and decided to hammer some training. In the last year I’ve taken my conditioning to a whole new level. I’ll be explaining a lot of that to you in the next few weeks and I’ve done a number of different exercises. I focused primarily on the kettlebell swing and closely behind it that bodyweight sprawl. These are two of the top conditioning exercises that exist anywhere in the world as well as two of the toughest. I’ll be telling you a great deal about the swing in the next few months because I’ve been really hammering that, but right now I want to talk about the sprawl.

There are a billion variations of it and really any way you do it it is monster productive. Some of the greatest cardio you can do because it involves the whole body in an long range of motion with moderately explosive movements (can be very explosive depending on which variation you use, but all of them require you to snap back from a push up position to a standing position). Years ago when I first got into fighting we used to incorporate them into different workouts and it used to kill me. In fact for most people when they first start sprawls they’re incredibly hard. But as with anything else you stick with it and they get easier and eventually in some cracked, twisted sort of way you start enjoying them. Maybe that’s all part of this twisted brotherhood of high level physical training and maybe it’s only a few of you out there who actually “like” them. You know who you are. You don’t have to be ashamed. You don’t have to hide in your secret meetings anymore…

In the last year a couple of times I’ve gone up to 500 reps either in a straight workout of sprawls on their own and also in a mixed workout with swings which included 500 swings and 500 sprawls. Tuesday night it was just sprawls. I wanted to do 1,000 reps of sprawls for a while now – it was a big conditioning goal. In fact it’s kind of like a climbing-the-mountain type of a goal where you know you’ve been somewhere and done something if you complete it. So when I started the workout the other night I set my mind on that number. That to me is one of the side benefits of working an exercise as demanding as the sprawl. Going to a difficult place with that exercise is as much mental as it is physical. It tests the strength of you mind and your belief. It’s one of those exercises that is enough general body fatigue paced in such a way that you can sort of just keep going as one body part is not nearly as likely to fatigue and shut you down as you are to shut down from systemic fatigue. But that’s where the real pain is as well as the real productivity.

I was doing them on a grappling mat and sweating so much that I literally had to move over every 20 reps or so because the water was pooling under me. It looked like somebody had dumped a bucket of water on the mat. But one hour and one minute after starting the workout I had done 1,000 reps. Now a lot of people would question, “Why in the world would you do that?” Well here’s the simple point – If you want radical results you have to put out radical effort. You don’t have to climb the mountain every day, but you do have to climb it if you really want results.

God bless,
Bud Jeffries

P.S. If you want more exercises to kick up your martial arts training be sure to check out Super Strength & Endurance for Martial Arts.