While all of the ten physical skills (endurance, stamina, strength, power, flexibility, coordination, accuracy, balance, speed, and agility) are important for your physical development, two of them occupy an essential role as a metaphorical “container” for many other capacities. These skills are strength and endurance, and they form the foundation, not only of some of the other skills, but of your performance capacities and functional health in general.

Consider your strength and your endurance each like a container. A small container limits the capacities that can fit into it. Increasing the size of this container means greater room to grow.

If we take stamina, or the ability to sustain a prolonged (generally intense) effort, as our example, both strength and endurance will act as the container in which stamina develops. A lack of either strength or endurance -- a small container, in other words -- will leave little room to increase stamina. You can directly train stamina all your want with high-repetition push-ups or snatches or whatever else, but without effort to increase the size of your container, your efforts will be largely fruitless.

This essential role of strength and endurance is the reason we dedicate entire training days to “pure” endurance training or strength training. While you can, up to a point, get stronger and increase your endurance with the commonly-used model of throwing multiple elements into every workout, you will fail to grow the capacities of your container beyond a certain point.

A self-limiting system is not a sustainable system. Don’t forget that while our purpose is to develop broad and general physical preparedness, our methods require specificity and tact.

- PS

10/17/19

• Back squat - in 10 minutes, work up to a heavy set of 5

Then...

• AMRAP 20

• 400m run

• 15 front rack KB squat, right (53/35)

• 15 front rack KB squat, left

• 15 single arm KBS, right (53/35)

• 15 single arm KBS, left