Review: Convict Conditioning by Paul Wade

If I had to pick one book to recommend on bodyweight training, this would be it. What Starting Strength is for barbell training, Convict Conditioning is for bodyweight training.

The good

1. Progressive bodyweight training

Whereas the other bodyweight training books I’ve read (You Are Your Own Gym, Bodyweight Strength Training Anatomy) are primarily long lists of disconnected bodyweight exercises, this book is all about progressive bodyweight training. That is, this book teaches you a way to incrementally and progressively increase the difficulty of bodyweight movements so that you can continue to get stronger and stronger over time, for years. I can’t overstate the importance of this focus. Here’s why:

Almost any new exercise routine can work for a few weeks or months, merely because it exposes your body to something new, but after that initial phase, your body adapts, and you stop making progress. As a result, results are limited, and most people give up.

The way you solve this problem with barbell training is to progressively increase the resistance. This is easy to do with barbells: you just add a few pounds to the bar each work out. If you keep increasing resistance and rest enough in between workouts, barbells allow you to keep getting strong for years due to supercompensation (brief overview here).

Accomplishing the same with bodyweight training is a lot harder. When you’re using your body for resistance, you can’t just “add a few pounds” to each workout! Adding more reps only works up to a point: beyond 10-15 reps, you’re training endurance or conditioning, rather than strength. So most people who do bodyweight training run into a dilemma: you start some exercise, such as push-ups, get good at it, work up to 15 reps, and now what? How do you keep getting stronger?

What’s brilliant about this book is that it focuses on just 6 exercises (more on this later) and 10 levels for each exercise, with level 1 being a very easy version of the exercise almost anyone can do, and level 10 being an extremely hard version of the exercise that will take you years to work up to (if you ever get there). For example, level 1 of push-ups is doing a wall push-up while standing up. Once you can do a certain number of sets/reps of those, you can move on to level 2, which is an incline push-up. When you can do a certain number of sets/reps of those, you move on to level 3, and so on. You progressively make the push-up motion harder and harder, until you get to level 10, which is doing multiple sets/reps of one-handed push-ups.

Going through these 10 levels for each exercise allows you to keep getting stronger and stronger for a very long time. Level 10 of some of these exercises are incredibly tough (e.g., one-handed pull-ups, one-arm handstand push-ups), so for most people, this will be a routine they can follow for years. Moreover, having so many levels makes the program accessible to just about all trainees, no matter what shape you’re in now, and going through these levels one by one provides a gradual and safe way to improve your flexibility, mobility, and the strength of your muscles, joints, and tendons in preparation for the harder versions.

2. A routine with just 6 exercises

There are thousands of exercises out there that you could do, but since most of us have limited time to train (and recover), it’s essential to pick the exercises that offer the biggest bang-for-the-buck. In general, you’ll get a more effective workout from getting really good at a small number of functional, multi-joint, compound exercises that move a lot of weight rather than being mediocre at a large number of lighter, single-joint, isolation exercises. Just as Starting Strength provides an effective routine that uses just 5 barbell movements (squat, deadlift, clean, overhead press, bench press), Convict Conditioning provides an effective routine that uses just 6 bodyweight movements, each with a 10-level progression:

• Squat (level 10 is multiple reps/sets of the one-legged squat)
• Push-up (level 10 is multiple reps/sets of the one-arm push-up)
• Pull-up (level 10 is multiple reps/sets of the one-arm pull-up)
• Bridge (level 10 is multiple reps/sets of the stand-to-stand bridge)
• Leg raises (level 10 is multiple reps/sets of the hanging straight leg raise)
• Wall handstand push-up (level 10 is multiple reps/sets of the one-arm wall handstand push-up)

The book offers a few routines you can use to work through these progressions, most of which have you train 2-4 days per week, 30-60 minutes per day, starting with level 1 on each exercise, and each time you meet the standard for a level, moving up to the next. It’s very easy to follow the routines and progressions, and if you manage to get to level 10 on each of these 6 exercises (which for most people will take years, if ever), you will be exceptionally fit.

3. Other useful tips

The book has a variety of other useful advice throughout:

• As implied by the title of the book, the book shares lots of tips and tricks on how to train in conditions where you have little-to-no equipment available and limited space, such as in prison. The 6 core exercises in the book require almost no equipment and some of the progressions make clever use of household items (e.g., chairs, basketballs, etc). I’m not in prison, but being trapped indoors due to COVID-19, I found some of the tips and tricks quite useful.

• The book points out that whereas barbell training teaches you to move an external object, bodyweight training teaches you to move your own body. The latter is likely more useful in most sports, fighting, and for overall health.

The not so good

• The subtitle of the book is silly. Ignore it.

• The writing isn’t very good and has a lot of unnecessary tough-guy talk. Ignore it.

• The book has weird, perhaps broken typography. Ignore it.

• The 6 exercises the book focuses on are great, but they feel incomplete to me. In particular, as is often the case with bodyweight training routines, the focus is primarily on the upper body, and the lower back and legs don’t get nearly enough attention, despite the fact that these parts of the body tend to matter far more in most real-world activities (playing sports, moving furniture, surviving a fight, etc). There’s also a lack of horizontal rowing, which tends to be important for keeping the shoulders healthy and balanced with all the pushing motions. I don’t recommend modifying the routine too much, but you may want to add 1-2 more lower body exercises (e.g., hyper extensions, reverse hyper extensions, broad jump, vertical jump, deadlift) and a rowing exercise (e.g., do a progression to work up to 1-arm horizontal rows).

• Level 10 varies wildly in difficulty across the 6 exercises. Level 10 of push-ups and squats, the one-arm push-up and one-legged squat, respectively, can be accomplished by the vast majority of people who train for them. On the other hand, relatively few people will get to level 10 of pull-ups, the one-arm pull-up, and I suspect virtually no one will get to level 10 of handstand push-ups, the one-arm handstand push-up. This isn’t a huge problem, though it does mean that if you work at it for a few years, you’ll get to the end of the progressions for some of these exercises much sooner than others, and will have to figure out new things to work on.

• The intro chapters try to make the case for why bodyweight training is superior and how the strongman of the past, who primarily used bodyweight training, were stronger than those of today, but this feels a bit silly to me. Bodyweight training has lots of advantages and drawbacks; so does barbell training. To claim one or the other is unilaterally better might help sell books, but that doesn’t make it true. As for the strongmen, it’s quite easy to see that modern strongmen have shattered just about every record from the past; the same goes for modern athletes in most sports; some of that is undoubtedly due to steroids, but training techniques have gotten better over time, and while we shouldn’t forget the past, we shouldn’t always assume it’s better than the present.

Rating: 5 stars