Stewart Smith - 101 Best Pyramid Training Workouts: The Ultimate Workout Challenge Collection

T he pyramid.

A warmup, max out and cooldown all rolled into one, the pyramid workout is referred to by many as the perfect workout. The typical pyramid describes an active rest circuit of exercises (resting while doing other exercises) and is a great foundation builder for increasing endurance and muscle stamina. It is also a muscle growth workoutwith calisthenics and high volume style resistance training, pyramid workouts are a great way to build mass.

The 100 stand-alone workouts in this book are among my favorite pyramid workouts I have ever created. These are my top 100 individual workouts that focus mainly on calisthenics, running, swimming, rucking, and easy-to-use weights like dumbbells, kettlebells, and sandbags. These are mostly high volume workouts, but you will see some heavy weight reverse pyramids, speed pyramids, and even swimming pyramids of different varieties, all of which are a testament to the versatility and ease with which pyramid workouts can be inserted into virtually any routine.

I recommend these workouts be performed two to three times a week for the upper body, with lower body and cardio pyramids in between as needed or desired. Just make sure to change things up with the many workouts included in this bookadding variety to your workout regimen is a surefire way to avoid plateaus and keep improving.

Rules of the PT Pyramid

1. Dont do it every day. Unless you change up the exercises youre doingfocusing on your upper body one day and your lower body the nextthe kind of volume of repetitions involved in pyramid workouts will require you take a day off before working the same muscle group again.

2. Dont go crazy with it. When you fail at an exercise, either change that exercise to an easier version, or else start to work your way back down the pyramid in reverse order. You can build up to some crazy high volume with these workouts and not even realize it, especially on legs and core exercises. Make sure youre progressing smartly: dont do 100 pull-ups in a single workout if you have never done more than 15-25 reps at once.

3. Get creative with it That said, you canand shouldget creative with adding exercises, reps and multiples to let you push yourself without hurting yourself. Adding a diverse group of exercises to your routine is fun and allows the body to recovery with active. For example, you may find that core exercises serve as good rest activity.

T he workouts in this book are organized into sections based on the type of workout they offer: upper body, upper body calisthenics and cardio, lower body calisthenics and cardio, full body calisthenics/resistance and cardio, and cardio/mobility workouts. Within these sections, each workout is given a descriptive moniker so that you can easily select the best workout for each day.

Some workouts are quick, while others require at least an hour to complete. Regardless, your goal should be to do what you can on that day and arrange your workouts smartly.

My advice on arranging the workouts into a complete week (5-6 days of training) would be as follows:

• Do your upper body workouts on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. You can also add in cardio workouts after the upper body resistance workouts. (Cardio is often mixed into these particular workouts.)
• Add leg days on the days in-between your upper body regimens (Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday) or at least some form of cardio where you use your legs, such as running, biking, rucking, swimming (with fins), or rowing.
• iven this type of volumeeven in calisthenicsit is recommended you use the same muscle group every other day when it comes to resistance training to allow for maximum recovery and growth. (The other option is to focus on full body workouts and do them every other day of the week, with rest or cardio days in between. Cardio pyramids have been provided for those days as well.)
• Progress your cardio workouts logically up to several days per week of running, biking, and swimming, but keep rucking at two to three times per week max for the purposes of these workouts.

The rules are that simple!

NOTE: There are no exercise descriptions or visual breakdowns provided for these workouts. If there are any exercises you do not recognize, see my YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/stew50smith to find over 120 exercise videos, swim technique videos, and even some of these workouts. You can also find all the videos in the easy-to-use free app Navy SEAL Exercises with Stew Smith, available on both Apple and Android devices.

For more guidance, you check out some of my other workout collections (listed at the end of this book).

If you take a look at the pyramid above, you will notice that it is numbered on both sides, going from 1-9 on the left with 10 on the top, then from 9-1 on the right. Each number represents a step in the pyramid. Your goal is to climb the pyramid all the way up and then all the way back down, so you can consider each step a set in your workout.

Here is how it works:

Starting at the bottom left of the pyramid, you will perform the lowest count set of your workout. For example: Pull-ups x 1, push-ups x 2, sit-ups x 3. What this means is that at each set or step of the pyramid, you perform 1 pull-up for every step you are on, 2 push-ups for each step, and 3 sit-ups for each step. So at 6, you would be performing 6 pull-ups, 12 push-ups and 18 sit-ups.

You would then keep progressing until you either get to the top of the pyramid, or your max at failure. (Again, at step 10 you would be performing 10 pull-ups, 20 push-ups and 30 sit-ups.) Now, you start working your way back down the other side. The next set you do will be repeating step 9 on the way back down, completing 9 pull-ups, 18 push-ups and 27 sit-ups. Keep going until youve worked all the way back down to step 1.

This is what makes the pyramid such an effective workout for high volumes of repetitions. For example, were you to do pull-ups for each level of the above 1-10-1 pyramid, you would achieve 100 pull-ups. It also means pyramids are great as an in-workout assessment tool. Lets say you do the pyramid one day and fail at set 8, but the following week you fail at set 9 or 10. You can see your progress each time you repeat the workout, just as you can see increased weight on the barbell when lifting.

Performing Pyramid Workouts

Start from the bottom at set 1 and perform the listed exercises. For each set (or step) of the pyramid, perform the same exercises again while increasing the number of reps by a multiple of the current step. For example, 1 push-up and 2 sit-ups on step 1 becomes 5 push-ups and 10 sit-ups on step 5. Continue until you reach the listed top of the pyramid, then repeat the previous steps in reverse order to descend the pyramid.