If you’re not aware, I’m quite fond of the work of NonProphet and their Space Program. I used their endurance, capacity, and strength programs to rebuild my fitness over an 18 month period. So, when they released a “program to end all programs” designed to “build autonomous athletes” I was immediately interested.
The “scaffolding” of the program consists of 35 total sessions. The introductory instructions were to pick 3 “hard” sessions and 3 “exploratory” sessions each week (6 training sessions total). That leaves one rest day, and makes this an approximately 6 week program.
However, you’ll note below — and this is noted by NP as well — that the program actually took me 9 weeks because I didn’t want to compromise my BJJ training. Additionally, if you could only “afford” — as in terms of recovery — 4 sessions per week, it might take you longer as well.
“The Space Program heavily emphasizes autonomy, which means the session you do and when you choose to do them are completely up to you. One of the biggest contributing factors to a lack of progression and motivation is to allow a schedule to dictate how, what, and when you should train. A calendar does not take into consideration your sleep quality or life stressors. While other programs will instruct you to ‘just do the work’, they don’t ever contend with much of the ‘work’ being understanding what and when you should train.”
Video Credit: @_thespaceprogram_
The point isn’t to just run yourself into the ground every session. It’s easy enough to find “make you puke” WODs online. But, do they produce long term results? Do / did you learn anything from them? Are you just puking, getting sore, and injured?
One thing to note is that the subscription to the program costs $30 / month. That’s a nominal fee for great information and the opportunity for an enlightening experience — should you choose to accept it.
Again, the point isn’t to “just do hard shit.” It’s to learn something in the process. Autonomy, not dependence.
“The Escape Velocity Program is designed to be done in order. However, it is up to you to decide whether you have what it takes to do that particular session on that day… This means our 6-week program may take you 8-9 weeks to complete and there is nothing wrong with that; it shows an important aspect of your own development, and that is that you are considering your own state and progression.
Further,
“Our program aims to teach participants how to train and, more importantly, think for themselves. The idea of doing it for oneself carries with it quite a bit of trepidation, so the goal of this 6-week on-ramp is to eliminate as much of that as possible.”
I will add to this review, that I don’t think I would have gotten as much out of the program if I hadn’t previously worked through each of the NonProphet manuals. That 18-month period really primed the tank of what to look for. Greg Everette’s suggestion to prompt yourself after every training session with these questions was a huge help as well:
What worked well and what allowed it?
What didn’t work and why?
Plan for next time?
Otherwise, it would have been easy to fall into the trap of just paying my $30 / month to have someone tell me what to do and learn absolutely nothing. Thus, the program would be a failure regardless of my fitness outcomes.
Overview / Summary:
“You may have noticed how we space the training and mix up sessions, and vary the types of training that you do each week. We find that this is the best way to approach a general fitness goal with sustainability and longevity as the foundation.
On the day you can take note of how you feel, consider what you did the previous two days or maybe what you have to do over the next few days, and make adjustments accordingly.”
General Impressions:
Overall, the program consisted of 35 written sessions. My log(s) show myself coming up a bit short because of added passive rest days (below). However, I know that I was able to make up a few mobility sessions by spreading them out and tacking on parts of them to other sessions as a “warm down.”
On the topic of “rest”, you can see that in 9 weeks I only had to take 5 days completely off — noted as difficulty of 0 in Figure 2.
Considering that I was training 7-days per week, that’s a pretty good run. It tells me that programming an intensity were scaled appropriately. This is a good lesson to remind oneself that you can find something to train or improve every day, but not if you’re trying to make every session a barn burner.
Note as well that the passive rest days became more frequent in the second half of the program. This is also good periodization, because after 9-weeks of accumulation, it’s time take a de-load week. For me that’s BJJ only with no added strength and conditioning work.
Figure 3 shows how energy systems and total training load vacillated week-by-week. What’s important to note here is that the total training load (difficulty * volume) did not remain at peak levels for all 9 weeks.
Specific / Individual Process:
Similar to Figure 3, Figure 4 shows the overall distribution of training session style. We can see that passive rest and BJJ combined for about half of my training sessions. In most athletes, I’d like to see this in the 60 - 70% range, but as I’ve written about before, the physicality (and the training of that physicality, i.e. fitness) of sport is more important at the tails of a bell curve — approximately the 15% worst and 15% best.
Figure 5 shows the distribution of session intensity / difficulty. The program did a good job of emphasizing that some sessions are hard because of their recovery need (intensity), but others are hard because of the difficulty or complexity of their movement patterns (mobility).
The visualization is helpful for future programming in that there were about as many totally passive rest days (Level 0) as there were really fucking hard days (Level 3).
The program sessions alone, without my additional BJJ training had the following difficulty distribution:
Level 3: 18.8%
Level 2: 46.9%
Level 1: 34.4%
This is, again, interesting from a programming note because I feel like a lot of time is “wasted in the middle ground”; at least speaking for myself and my own training history. That is, the mistake of neither training light enough to learn new skills (Level 1), or hard enough to produce novel stimulation (and corresponding adaptation).
However, the numbers don’t quite tell the whole story, because as I mentioned above, sometimes the movements themselves were the difficult part (Level 2) and there was a lot learned. Similarly, a good “hypertrophy” (Level 2) session also felt like a good “active recovery” option — think of “pump” as blood flow to clear waste and provide nutrients.
I noted in one of the later mobility sessions, that I could feel my heart pumping at maybe 120 bpm or so, which is like a brisk walk or light ruck. That’s a good reminder of the additional energy cost of inefficient movement (lack of mobility) as well as finding clever ways to stimulate that blood flow for recovery.
Another pointed lesson was the value of long warm ups. They don’t necessarily need to be “hard”, but an effective warm up should:
Prepare your body for the “working” tasks via:
global blood flow and oxygenation, and
movement specific patterns (pre-fatigue, neurological activation)
Be used as an assessment tool of your current state of under/recovery (your internal “readiness" score”).
Going Forward & Remaining Questions:
“The point (of Escape Velocity) was to introduce players to creative ideas and concepts… learn different variations and lexicon that might be used… you may have learned what you enjoy doing (and) your goal now is to use the Space Program as a creative device to gear your training to what you want it to be like.”
Obviously, I learned a lot about my physical strengths and limitations throughout this process. I can’t say any of it was new news though. The perennial proverbial “slaps in the face” were louder and stung a little more each time.
In general, strength is not my problem; or weakest link / limiting factor. That mantle goes to aerobic under/development and O2 Mobilization (obviously accelerated by the former). I also learned that my overhead pressing isn’t particularly bad, but horizontal pressing (traditional bench press) is a particularly weak movement for me. Regarding mobility, more old news, my hamstrings, soleus / tibialis, hips, and thoracic spine all need work.
Much to the point of the program though, I didn’t just learn “I suck at endurance work”, but have some numbers and data points to go off of. On Instagram, I posted a chart of how my breath patterns map onto AirBike cadences. I also learned that my “top gear” is about 87 RPM (703 watts) and I can hold a 20 cal / min pace for about 1 minute. Right around the 2 minute mark my output is severely compromised, dropping to 15 cal / min. Typically I call “my Zone 2” ~10 cal / min. However, around 30-40 min I drop to a “true Zone 2” or “90-minute pace” of around 8 cal / min.
“The Escape Velocity program was designed to showcase our style of general fitness training, but also serve as a bridge to what we believe to be the holy grail of training: creativity and intuition.“
One observation I had of the Escape Velocity program was the number of comments on “hard” sessions versus easier ones. Obviously the number of comments doesn’t equal the number of participants, but nevertheless I thought it was interesting that the easier ones had less engagement. In my opinion the “easy” sessions were a crucial part of the learning process.
Moving forward in to the “Free Fall Program” — described as a “choose your own adventure” progression from Escape Velocity — all of these mechanisms will be valuable tools.
General Recommendations for Grapplers:
The above section lists what I will be looking to develop in myself individually, but through myself I’d like to craft some specific recommendations (benchmark metrics and programming) for grapplers.
“Recoverability (capacity)” sessions — crafted with combinations of explosive movements, cardio machines, and impaired rests or body weight movements — feel the closest to fighting. O2 Mobilization (capacity) directly supports recoverability, but is mediated itself by aeraobic ability more than strength.
Additionally, as much as recoverability mimics fighting, sharpening makes things brittle and ignores the non-sexy foundation and hardening endurance work creates. So, I want to develop some simple tests, measures, and methods for addressing the general and specific physical “fit-ness” of grapplers.
Off the cuff, this might look like:
Strength: Deadlift 3RM
Capacity (O2 Mobilization): 10 min AirBik for max calories.
Capacity (recoverability): Death by Power Clean (body weight) + burpee
Endurance: TBD
Power: TBD
Session Logs and Notes:
For the exact programming, session structures, and protocols I used, see the related premium content.