The benefit of having muscles AND cardio
Well..
The first benefit is proving everyone wrong about the fact that you can’t have great muscle and good cardio at the same time in your life.
Very satisfying. That is a HUGE one.
These days, you have a better chance of meeting the Yeti and the Loch Ness Monster than of meeting someone who has both muscle and cardio.
Fortunately, you are on my email list, and you don’t fall for this crap.
When I started Army conditioning for civvies, my idea was to develop a strong body (read: lifting heavy weights when needed), while staying agile, explosive & fast, and among the things I didn’t want was to bulk and spend my whole life in a gym.
And as I age, as a father of 5, homeschooling them, I like the idea of CRUSHING younger men in their fitness capacity.
Very satisfying again.
Competition is healthy when you do it right.
If you are a grown-up man with responsibilities, a family, a living, and you can outpace younger men in their 20s, you are just a legend to my eyes.
To reach that point, I built my program around 3 parts:
Strength training: most people will think that what I am offering is new, but it’s not. It’s as old as your grandpa’s grandpa, but it might be new to you. I don’t buy the new trend in fitness, new machines, new needle to kiss. I’m only interested in what’s worked, what works, and what will always work.
Then,
I switch to Exploding and moving (the conditioning part).
It’s simple (not easy), but it worked for me and many others.
Single-leg training exposing weakness
I just took the bull by the horns in my backyard minutes ago.
I did my special single-leg workout with nothing but a jumping rope and a kettlebell. This is what I call a ‘’No underwear workout ” because you are really naked when you do it. You expose your real strength level to the world.
You can’t hide from it.
You either do it, or you don’t.
But why do I inflict this on myself when I can do something else?
Well… there are two main reasons. First, because you truly want to unlock a new skill: the pistol squat. If Google says the truth and nothing but the truth, only 2-3% of the world can do a pistol squat.
It’s a cool thing to do, especially when you are a grown-up adult with responsibilities and five kids at home.
The other reason is that I want my kids to see me doing tough things from the beginning, when I’m not yet able to do it, and then doing it with hard work.
There is a valuable lesson here. Hard work pays, and will always pay. This is something that we miss in the age of social media and all the comfort we have.
If you are curious about my short, energizing training, it’s based on my principles: Explode, lift, move. Just being strong isn’t enough; just conditioning isn’t enough; just being fast isn’t enough.
When you are doing Army Conditioning For Civvies, you are not just in better shape.. That’s just one of the many things that you will enjoy. It changes the perception of others of you. People will start asking how your training goes, what you have changed, how many reps you are doing, what exercises,
But it’s just a clumsy way of saying they’re proud of you.
Talking about men here.
We are just terrible at saying good things about others, but they are proud of you.
When you walk into the grocery store, between two aisles of desserts, you will be different. A lot more confident. People will notice.
Talking about real experience here.
Simple Fitness Sabotage Field Manual
The Office of Strategic Services, the ancestor of the CIA in the United States, published a CLASSIFIED book in early 1940s (during world war 2) to give ordinary citizen tips & tricks to sabotage their enemies,
Everything you do, as small as it can be seen, contribute to your success.
This book has been DECLASSIFIED 68 years later, in 2008 and now accessible to the public for the first time.
All tips seems to be useless, under-the-radar and not-to-impressive, BUT, it was highly effective.
Take a simple look at the section of General Interference with Organizations and Production:
‘’ Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.’’
‘’When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible—never less than five. ‘’
‘’Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.’’
‘’ “Misunderstand” orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can. ‘’
See? It’s still applicable today.
But, it was HIGHLY effective to sabotage the ennemie, without raising suspicions.
In strength training, I am pretty sure a similar book exist, it just hasn’t been DECLASSIFIED yet.
‘’SIMPLE FITNESS SABOTAGE FIELD MANUAL’’
In the section ‘’equipement’’, pretty sure they are some things like:
‘’Make sure your partner use wrist wrap, knees wraps and all kind of wrap possible during his training.
You know why?
Because when you are doing strength training, you want to impose as much stress as possible to your body, not LESS, and that’s exactly what wraps does.
This sort of stress is the only type of stress that is beneficial to your health.
In fact, I should write this simple fitness sabotage field manual for real, so I can DESTROY some misconception in the fitness world.
Meanwhile, you can follow my Army Conditioning For Civvies book to get in the best shape of your life.
A Modern sentence to Socrates
I had a random thought this morning about an old Athenian man who lived 400 years before Jesus Christ. No chance that I met him.
(no idea why, but it happened)
And then, I added a twist from my satirical, sarcastic, creative sense of humour.
What would his sentence look like in 2026?
If you remember correctly, Socrates’ crime was:
-refusing to recognize the traditional gods of the city of Athens.
-he introduction of new deities
-The corruption of the youth: encouraging young disciples to question authority, traditions, and the certainties of the elders.
His sentence?
DEATH by HEMLOCK
(Poison)
In 2026, he would have been judged based on the color of his skin, but anyway, he would have received a slow death sentence, such as:
-Eating processed food every day;
(Which is why Josy and I started growing our own food in our backyard.) Even ‘’natural’’ foods have tons of chemicals you can’t even pronounce the name properly without twisting your tongue – we want to be as close as possible to food self-reliance without going crazy.
-Warming a chair all day;
(we like to take a long walk in the family every day to spend time outside together (at least 3 hours a day), while getting energized by the sun)
Not lifting heavy weights;
(This is my favorite part, and I make sure my 5 kids see me (monkey see, monkey do). They started to train with me like it’s something natural and fun to do – which is it).
One perk of lifting heavy weights is building your resilience and mental toughness, because when your body tells you it’s too heavy, it triggers your mind, and that is the deciding factor in whether you lift the weight.
I know I’M TERRIBLE.
Same sentence, different era, different way, same outcome.
Fortunately, I got the cure for him. It’s called Army conditioning for Civvies. It turns any living human into something different. Stronger, healthier, happier. Guilty of something or not, it works.
It has never been about fitness.
There are very few things in life that bring tears to my eyes as a man, but watching a true story about sportspeople who have achieved great feats is one of them.
Coach Carter is definitely one of them. Big George Foreman is another.
You might tell me that there are no high-achieving things in Coach Carter’s movie, a story about a high-school basketball team, but you would be totally wrong.
Based on the movie, young Black men in Contra Costa County are 80% more likely to go to prison than to college.
That’s the path that awaits them.
There is always one thing that is common in these types of movies. Flip the script the way you want; you will almost always find this thing, and it’s not about sports or fitness.
In the case of George Foreman, a young, lost, poor kid where anger was his only answer :
“Anger was my answer to everything. I couldn’t stop myself from fighting. It was the only thing I did well.”
His path was supposed to be severe poverty.
At age 16, George was hiding from the police under a house after a street robbery.
Then, something changed.
He became heavyweight champion in boxing in 2 differents generations, beating up Joe Frazier in 1973 and Gerry Cooney in 1990.
You want to know the difference between following the path that was designed to them or achieving something worthy in life?
Sure, you want!
There it is:
Someone, at some point, has seen something in these people that they didn’t see in themselves, and that, my friend, is the thing that changes everything.
As I am watching Big George Foreman’s movie right now, the reporter said after the fight against Gerry Cooney (Heavyweight champion in his 20s), while George was a 45-year-old man:
‘’It’s not the size of the man in the fight, but the size of the fight in the man.’’
It has always been. When the body can’t, the mind will be the deciding factor if you will do it or not.
Army conditioning for civvies is much more than fitness, strength or anything. It’s designed to show you that you already have what you need inside you.
At the end, I’m not crying; my eyes are just wet.
The missing ingredient to strength & power
I love my white bread in the morning—fresh, soft, and CANCER-FREE.
(I know, I’m picky)
We used to make our own sourdough bread at home, but with five kids, the pace became unsustainable because the bread would disappear pretty quickly—either we’d eat the whole loaf the same day, or it would walk alone the day after, since there was no preservative.
The goal was to produce as much as possible at home to avoid processed foods or those containing questionable pesticides—which we don’t always know about—or, even worse, genetically modified fish in my broccoli.
But, you know what’s funny about bread?
If you’re missing just ONE ingredient—just ONE—your bread won’t rise, even if you have all the other ingredients right.
When it comes to bread, that ingredient would be the sourdough starter, but for strength training, it would definitely be the progressive overload principle ‘’the missing ingredient’’.
People think this concept is fairly recent in modern history, but it actually dates back to ancient Greece with Milo of Croton. This man wanted to become the strongest man in Greece, but he knew he had to take action to achieve that.
Here’s the idea he came up with:
He took a young lamb and walked in circles around the stadium with it to build his strength and endurance. Over time, the lamb grew bigger and heavier, but he continued with the same exercise.
Thanks to the load that kept getting heavier and heavier, Milo became extremely strong and enduring, eventually becoming the strongest wrestler in all of Greece.
It’s a concept I’ve definitely incorporated into my book Army Conditioning for civvies, but with a slight twist.
