Beast Workout Day 3: Upper Body

Man performing pull-up
(Image credit: Men’s Fitness)

For the third of this four-part series, you’ll be doing a medicine ball complex. But before you get stuck into the ball work, you need to bang out a load of pull-ups. “Why?” you ask. Because the pull-up is the king of the upper-back builders and will balance the pushing work you’re doing on the bench so you don’t end up hunched over. It’s also a good way to keep track of your relative strength: if your max pull-ups figure stays the same but you’re putting on weight, then you’re getting stronger.
 
“I don’t like people doing weighted pull-ups until they can do 12 clean reps unweighted,” says strength and conditioning coach Zach Even-Esh, who programmed this series. “If you can’t do that, try 'greasing the groove' by doing multiple sets of a few reps, say three or four every 30 seconds for five minutes.” Check out our pull-up form guide, if you want a simple guide to the bog standard pull-up.

How To Do The Workout

If you’re already fairly decent at pull-ups, aim to do between three and five warm-up sets, and then do three serious sets (or ‘work sets’) with a weight that’ll challenge you even for a low number of reps.
 
Once you've done the pull-ups it’s time to move onto the medicine ball complex. “This is a classic metcon workout,” says Even-Esh. “It may be short but it's a killer. The idea of the workout is simple: do 10 reps of all the exercises back to back. That's one round. If you've still got something left in the tank, cycle through the complex again.”

  1. Reverse woodchop
  2. Passing press-up
  3. Russian twist
  4. Overhead squat

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4