I’ve never been particularly fond of “challenges” because of the mentality with which most people approach them. Too often, people approach a challenge with an outcome in mind. They do a Whole30 because they want to lose 10 pounds. They run a marathon because… they want to lose 10 pounds.

In most cases the structure of an arbitrary challenge isn’t the best way to approach the goal. A carefully considered strategic plan built around your own individual starting point and needs makes more sense.

But what challenges can be really good for are the things you learn in the process when you’re stuck into arbitrary constraints.

Take the Million Pound November challenge for example. Doing 33,333lbs of volume every single day for a month is at the upper end of most people’s capacity, if it’s within their limits at all. For where I am right now, it’s definitely at my upper end. The last time I completed the challenge it wasn’t, I was training a lot more and a lot harder and I was able to easily knock out 60k and 90k days to create a bit of a natural “wave” in my training – the way physiology actually works.

But now since I’m bumping up against my limits almost every day I’m learning some interesting things. Plus another arbitrary constraint is that I’m going to be traveling the rest of this week, which means I knew I needed to complete 500k by the 12th, so I could take 5 days completely off, and finish the other 500k in the last 13 days of the month.

And I’m smoked.

My hips are exhausted, my lower back is fried, and I’m more than ready for the break.

If not for that arbitrary constraint, I would have already taken a day or two off. But it’s interesting to see how my body is reacting to pushing on even when I know it’s not ideal. I’ve still been testing, and it has continued to test well, but I know that I’m on the edge.

What I’m curious to see is how my body reacts to a full 5 days off after such an intense push. My hunch is that it’ll be enough time to have a pretty substantial recovery, and I’ll come back to find hitting the same kinds of lifting days is way easier than it was over the past two weeks. Only one way to find out, as these things go.

Ultimately, I don’t care what the “outcome” of this challenge is because the reward is in the process and what I learn from it.

How’s your Million Pound November going, or what’s the last challenge you learned something from?

If you’re newly paying attention to training volume, whether for Million Pound November or simply because it’s an important metric to understand how your training affects your body, you may run in to questions about how to track certain things.

For a bit of background, tracking accurately and diligently is a critical component of the Movement method of training, and I’ve built two tools to facilitate it. One is internal to members of my gym, the other is adaptifier which is available to the public.

As such, we’ve had a lot of time to figure out how to quantify various things that might at first seem hard to track. This applies to keeping score for Million Pound November as it does every day tracking.

• Bodyweight Movements: Use an appropriate percentage of bodyweight. For example, push-ups are about 70% bodyweight in the hands, adjust accordingly for decline or incline. Bodyweight lunges are about 50% bodyweight, whereas bodyweight squats are about 25% bodyweight. Pull-ups are 100% of bodyweight.
• Core & Short-ROM Movements: Things like sit-ups or planks aren’t as obvious to track as a bodyweight squat for example. For these I arbitrarily use a value of 25 or 50 depending on how challenging they are. It’s not perfect, but gives you a consistent way to quantify them and that’s more than sufficient.
• Carries & Non-Stationary Movement: Use the weight you’re carrying as your resistance, and equate about 10 yards or meters of distance as 1 repetition. Multiply accordingly.
• Weighted Movements: Use the weight on the bar only. I don’t count barbell back squats as a 25% bodyweight squat plus the barbell.

A couple points on tracking in general if you’re NOT trying to keep “score” for the MPN Challenge:

• Running & Other Cardio: Use your pace on a scale of 1-10 as your resistance, 10 would be as fast as you can go. For reps, multiply your distance in miles or kilometers (just be consistent) by 100. i.e. 1 mile = 100 reps, or 26.2 miles = 2620 reps.
• Random Other Movement Things: Quantifying things in other forms of training can be really useful, even if they don’t fit into convenient buckets. After a while you’re understand what 3, 5, or 10 thousand pounds of volume “feels” like. You can rate an indoor climbing session on a scale of 1-10 of difficulty, and then track the volume based on that feel of how much work you did. Provided you’re internally consistent,  it’ll be useful over time.

I can’t stress enough how important tracking volume is. Whether your training is going well or poorly you can tell an enormous amount about what is going on simply from this one number. Once you get a handle on how to manipulate volume and how your physiology responds, you’ve unlocked one of the major keys to unbelievable progress.

As you can probably imagine, moving a million pounds of total volume in just a month pours on a fair amount of stress. For context, I’ve lifted six times in the past six days, and accumulated more total volume than any of the six-person teams currently doing the challenge at The Movement.

You might think that I’m well on my way to injury, or that I’m doing a lot of pre-hab, correctives, or soft tissue work to stay healthy. But I’m not doing any of that bullshit, and I won’t get hurt.

I’m confident I can keep loading on the volume not because my form is perfect, I’ve done the right warm-ups, or because I’ve dutifully done my corrective exercises.

The reason people get hurt lifting is not because of what and how but what and when.

The exact same movement done the exact same way one day can be the movement that hurts you the next day. Which is why so many injuries seem so random, so sudden, and so unpredictable. Sure we try to explain it after the fact that our form felt off, or it was because of what you did the day before, or whatever. And maybe that is true, or maybe it’s just ex post facto.

The actual reason for most training injuries is that you did something at a time when your body couldn’t handle that stress.

If only you could have known that it was a bad time to do it, you could have avoided it.

But you can.

​The core benefit of using biofeedback to test your movements and exercise is a way to filter out the things that your body is responding badly to right now. If you test negatively to a deadlift with just the bar, how do you suppose your body is going to respond when you load double bodyweight onto the bar? Yeah sure you might get away with it in the sense that you don’t become aware of an acute injury, but your stress load and margin for error is going to be right at the very edge.

Over the years I’ve had countless people come back to me and say “David, I really wanted to do frogger thrusters but they didn’t test well so I did them anyway, and that’s when I felt a pop in my back.” I never like hearing these stories, but I’ve heard enough of them that it’s important to note.

Let me state this as plainly as possible:

I have not found a single more effective way to avoid injury than to test all your movement with biofeedback.

No screening strategy, no stretching protocol or system, no corrective exercise model, nothing is even remotely as effective as simply testing all your movement, doing what tests well, and modifying or skipping what doesn’t.

Despite the many, many attempts there is no way to reliably predict if someone is going to get hurt. Movement screens don’t work. But we can know right now, from one moment to the next how you’re actually responding to movement.

Corrective exercise systems fail for the same reason. They’re not reliable or predictive because they assume everyone responds the same way to the correctives. If it’s a “corrective” it’s good for you, right? No, because if it doesn’t test well then it’s just bad movement. On the flip side all movement that tests well is corrective. You know what is a great corrective exercise for posture? A heavy deadlift (that tests well.)

Biofeedback is like my secret weapon when it comes to staying healthy and being able to continue training consistently, even at extreme volumes and frequencies.

If you’re not testing all your movement my only question is, why not?