Adding high rep work to S&C Gen 2

Training Q&A [Moderated]
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First off thanks for S&C Gen 2. I’m about 9 weeks in and seeing great results. I’m trimming down right now and the strength loss has been noticeably less than other cutting phases. And the conditioning work is paying off both in weight loss and performance gains.

My question revolves around needing to add high rep work, specifically pushups. My work has a PAT test very similar to the Army PAT. A 1 mile run, a shuttle run, an obstacle course, deadlift, plank for time and pushups in a minute. S&C has helped the mile, obstacle course and shuttle run times by doing variations of them for conditioning. Deadlift and plank are pretty standard times to meet so no issue there. Which leaves push ups and how/if to add them to the program.

I’m doing the 4 day split so my thought is to sub in a few rounds of max rep pushups in a minute in place of the triceps block on day three. Maybe add lighter weights to get some variation week to week?

Any pro advice is definitely welcome on adding some focus to max rep pushups into the 4 day split.

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Hey Derek,

I think the first questions I’d ask are:

  • Do you need to do specialized training for this, or are you already maxing out the test?
  • Do you want to do specialized training for this, or are you satisfied with the current programming?

For the former, it is possible your previous and current training has developed great push-up proficiency. If so, I’d probably not train for it specifically, and I’d pat myself on the back for a job well done when it comes to training over the years (and programming).

For the latter, I’d do the push-up work in place of the direct triceps exercise in this template. Regarding the programming, it would depend on how far away you are from your target score/how much you want to train this directly. I don’t think lighter weight push-ups (band-assisted) would likely be useful or lighter weight/higher rep pressing variations would work better than exposure to body weight push-ups, as the rest of the program has a lot of pressing variety.

For this specific application, I’d plan on training to the test in two ways:

  • testing 1 min max push ups to develop a strategy/cadence
  • doing multiple clusters of sub max push up sets (RPE 7-8) with recovery between sets
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Thanks for the quick reply Jordan!
I would say I want to and need to do specialized training. The run time and push ups are the only two events where I either can’t hit the max (run) or am right on the borderline of max(pushups). Our PAT is broken up in to age brackets, after running the low fatigue template last year and into January of this year then S&C II leading up to the test this week I was able max out all 6 events for the first time in my old man bracket. Which made me look at the youngest bracket to see how far away I am. I’m ~1:20 off on the mile time so that is a stretch goal for sure. On the pushups I only need to add about 10 reps to my best score (moving from 68 to 78 reps).

I like the sound of this setup, how often would you retest?

  • testing 1 min max push ups to develop a strategy/cadence
  • doing multiple clusters of sub max push up sets (RPE 7-8) with recovery between sets
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Once very ~4 weeks I’d re-test to get a new proportional number for the cluster sets (e.g. increase in 2 reps on test, add 2 reps to cluster set target).

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