New Training Phase: Raw Dog
Raw Dog is a milestone phase of training for us: it marks the beginning of the 4th consecutive year of continuous programming. Our ability to keep churning this stuff out, unbroken, for that long is less a testament to us and more a testament to all of you who have chosen to follow along on the ride!
The past few phases have been an interesting sort of experiment in turning over a lot of decision-making authority to you, the athlete. In all honesty, that’s a theme that will probably stick around for a long time. What makes Raw Dog unique, however, is less the nuts-and-bolts of the program itself and more the philosophical underpinning of how you’re meant to navigate the whole thing.
Overview
It’s become pretty obvious in the past few years that data, wearables, and the “quantified self” are spreading into nearly every aspect of our lives, and in very few places is that so pressingly evident as the fitness space. Raw Dog is built around a training philosophy that’s meant to challenge you to move away from data and instead focus more on your subjective experience with the training itself.
Instead of building prescriptions around specific paces, exact weights, perfect rest times, etc. we’re scaling way, way back and prescribing specific subjective cues that are designed to both de-complicate training but also autoregulate it in such a way that it seamlessly meets you where you’re at.
For those of you who have been with Long and Strong for quite some time, some of these concepts will be very familiar to you. Autoregulation via RPE or RIR in the strength work, for example, is a core concept of how we build training. Some of the newer approaches, however, should present pretty novel training stimuli for even the most ardent followers of our brand.
For example, here is a peek at one of the interval training sessions in this upcoming phase:
8 rounds
Run hard, but smooth, for about 75–90 seconds.
Your breathing should become heavy, but your stride should stay relaxed and athletic. Finish each rep feeling like you could have run another 10–15 seconds if you absolutely had to.
Walk until your breathing returns to mostly conversational, then begin the next rep.
If your stride starts to lose its snap or your mechanics noticeably deteriorate, end the workout and switch back to an easy nose-breathing run...even if you haven’t completed all 8 reps.
You can see that although the instruction is relatively lengthy, the intent couldn’t be more simple. Run for a period of time at an effort that feels a certain way, then rest until you feel like you’re ready to repeat that effort again.
By approaching training this way, the hope is that we slowly teach you to pay more attention to yourself and less attention to the algorithms. This isn’t meant to be an attack on data…certainly it has its place…but more than once have I heard an athlete determine how they’re feeling on the day not because of any intrinsic indicators; rather, because their wearable gave them a “score” as soon as they woke up. Let’s fight against that.
Programming Structure
I say this in all of our phases: the underlying structure is very much “hybrid” in nature from the standpoint that we aren’t eliminating any one focus in favor of another.
Strength Work
We’ll have two dedicated strength days for this phase, with elements of the aforementioned “subjective regulation” scattered throughout. One nice thing about this phase is that TrainHeroic just released an update allowing the programming of rep ranges, which is a nice benefit considering we’ve been annotating them in the comments for years. Movements emphasized at the beginning of this phase are the shoulder press and the barbell split squat, with accessory work slotting in accordingly.
Endurance Work
The endurance portion of this phase is probably the most interesting when it comes to eliminating the dependency on wearables. On the one hand, we still need you wearing watches so that you can check the time on your efforts. On the other hand, we’ve written all of our prescriptions along the lines of what you saw earlier in this post, so we’re sort of trusting that you leave your paces and heart rate monitors behind.
The biggest shift here is that you won’t ever see a specific distance prescribed, either on interval days or longer-duration efforts. We’re going purely by time and regulating our intensity purely on feel. If you ever wanted to get weird with your endurance work (i.e. taking out your headphones and listening to the birds), now is the time to do it.
Work Capacity
Although work capacity is taking a bit of a back seat in this phase relative to the main role it’s played in earlier stuff (ex: Work Horse), I’ve still decided to have a bit of fun with it. First and foremost, we’re leveraging work capacity largely as a way of injecting an additional aerobic day. Those of you who have been here before will understand that to mean longer efforts (45-60+ minutes) executed at a sustainable intensity.
The constraint I’ve given myself programming-wise is that none of the work capacity efforts are allowed to consist of more than three movements. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something incredibly enticing about a super simple couplet (i.e. sled push and farmer’s carry) done repeatedly for a long time. This type of work really allows you to disappear into the effort and, if done correctly, almost creates a moving meditation.
Final Thoughts
I’m excited about this one. It’s weird, but in a good way. A lot of our content recently has focused less on the “perfect program” and more on encapsulating the philosophy around training human beings. For my money, that begins with taking a step back from quantifying and measuring everything and instead shifting towards actually enjoying the experience and using the signals that your body is giving you to make decisions about how hard to push.