Most athletes train hard. Few train for anything. Take the test. Find out where you actually stand.
Free · Six events · Scored against a fixed standard
The Struggle Standard is a fixed, repeatable annual performance test. Six events. Six physical qualities. A clear tier system. Your score this year is directly comparable to your score next year, and to every other athlete’s.
Two of the three programs here — Earn The Right and Conjugate Hybrid Training — are built to prepare you for that test, develop the capacity to pass it, and raise the score year over year. The third, Push. Pull. Legs., is not, and says so on its own page. Different road, same standard of work.
This is not a program that promises results. It demands them, then verifies them with a test that does not lie.
You either meet the standard, or you don’t. That clarity is the point.
The test is fixed. The standards do not change year to year. Take it once. Beat it next year. The score doesn’t adjust for how hard you tried.
Three lifts, one rep each. The strength reserve everything else pulls from.
Three attempts, longest counts. Strength expressed in a fraction of a second.
For time, ten-minute cap. Run, lift, stand up from horizontal, repeat.
5 strict pull-ups + 10 hand-release push-ups. No kipping. Upper-body strength endurance, unambiguous.
Sustained threshold and aerobic output. The capacity that backs everything else.
400m carry → 30s hold → 100m carry → 30s hold → 50 FS @ 95 lb. Structural integrity under fatigue.
The test reports where you land across six events. The tiers are honest: you finished, you passed, you handled it, you dominated it, or you set a new standard. The dial is set at the top.
CHT is dimensioned for Elite. Not Pass. Not Capable. Not Dangerous.
The road to the test runs on one chassis. Same days, same blocks, same accessory architecture, same brand of work. The dial moves. ETR builds the base. CHT presses the standard. The athlete moves between them with no re-acclimation.
The on-ramp dial. Same conjugate architecture, lower intensity. Two athletes belong here: the already-trained athlete using lower intensity to drive recomposition into fat oxidation instead of CNS recovery, and the athlete with sports background on-ramping toward CHT. The cap is the work.
The full dial. Twelve waves across fifty-two weeks, peaking at the Struggle Standard test cluster. Six concurrent qualities — strength, power, glycolytic, gymnastic, aerobic, durability — trained together, dosed against an annual budget, none allowed to atrophy.
Not taking the test? Push. Pull. Legs. is the other road — further down this page.
Most programs claim a result and never test for it. Three things the Struggle Standard refuses to be confused with — and what it does instead.
Bench press on Monday, run on Tuesday. A decent squat and a decent VO2 max — in isolation. Two programs in a trench coat. When a real demand arrives, the qualities don’t add up. They collapse.
Every quality, every cycle. Strength, power, anaerobic capacity, gymnastics, aerobic base, and loaded durability — trained together, dosed against an annual budget.
Built around the aesthetic of a uniform you don’t wear. The intensity is real; the framing borrows from a context the athlete is not actually in. The standards drift to whatever the program writer felt like that week.
A standard you set for yourself and verify against. Six events. Fixed scoring. Your score this year compared directly to your score next year.
Six lifts and a rule that says add five pounds. It works for months — then one Tuesday you miss the reps, you miss them again Friday, and nothing in the file tells you what to do next. So you’re on a forum at eleven at night asking strangers.
Programs that already know what happens after the stall — the method progresses, not just the load, and every block ends on a number you can compare to the last one.
Ninety minutes is the conjugate road as designed — the dose the standard is built against. But the week doesn’t always cooperate. Every ETR and CHT purchase includes a sixty-minute version of every session: the same work, trimmed to the floor.
Every block, every quality, the full accessory architecture. The program in full, and the dose the test is calibrated against. Train it whenever the time is yours.
Shipped with both — not a separate purchase. For the week that collapses, or the day you’ve only got an hour. The primary work stays; the margin comes off. Sixty is the floor, not a lighter plan — go under it and you stop training the standard.
Same waves. Same work. The clock bends — the standard doesn’t.
CHT is twelve waves across fifty-two weeks. You don’t buy the year and you don’t rent it by the month. You buy the wave you’re about to train, and it belongs to you from then on.
Roughly a month of training per wave. Buy the next one when you’re ready for it — not before, and never on a schedule someone else set. A launch price that rises as the program proves itself.
Every wave you buy is yours permanently. Nothing expires, nothing gets taken back, and nothing disappears if you stop buying. Next year is a new twelve waves aimed at what the test exposed — and everything you already bought is still on your phone.
There is no calendar to fall off. Miss a session and you pick it up where you left it. The 9-day cycle was never built to fit a week — and a year that peaks was never built to live behind a monthly bill.
Twelve waves. Bought one at a time — kept forever. (A program that never ends is a different case — Push. Pull. Legs. runs monthly on TrainHeroic, and monthly is the right shape for it.)
Two words. Not a tagline. The instruction every program here runs on. Choose the difficult, deliberate rep now — on a day when you do not feel like it — because the person who shows up at the test is built by exactly those reps.
Start with the test — it’s free, and it tells you which road you’re on. Three programs. Two roads. Pick by what you actually want, not by how good you think you are.
Six events, once a year. Same standards, year after year. Free to take — and always will be. Run it, log your score, get your tier. It tells you which program you belong in.
Take The Test →Sixteen cycles on the 8-day cycle. Profile A: already trained, recovery capacity goes into fat oxidation instead of CNS recovery — body composition, inside an architecture. Profile B: athletic background, on-ramping toward CHT.
Start EarningTwelve waves, fifty-two weeks, six concurrent qualities, peaking at the test cluster. Sold one wave at a time — $39 each, owned permanently. At launch the first three ship together for $99 — and the first 50 buyers pay $69.
Get the Free 9-Day Sample see it on TrainHeroic →Not everybody wants a test, and I’d rather a man trained well on the road he’s on than badly on the one I prefer. The conjugate road asks how good can I get, and can I prove it? This one asks how big and strong can I get in the gym I already go to? Both get answered properly. Neither is the beginner version of the other.
Forty-nine weeks of push, pull and legs — heavy barbell work up front, real pump work behind it, and every lift one you already know how to do. Six training days and two rest days every eight, and the rest days move when your week says so. Any conventional gym. It does not prepare you for the Standard, and it doesn’t pretend to.
$20 a month, live on TrainHeroic, cancel anytime. The first eight days — Cycle Zero, the ramp-in that sets your six training maxes — are free either way.
See Push. Pull. Legs. → see it on TrainHeroic →The free Struggle Standard guide walks you through each of the six test events, explains what the program builds toward, and asks whether your current training is preparing you for any of it.
Not taking the test? The Push. Pull. Legs. primer is the free guide for that road — eight days, six training maxes, and the methods the program runs on.
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No grading on effort. No participation awards. The Struggle Standard is a fixed test that reflects exactly what you have built. It costs nothing to find out where you actually stand — and if the test was never your road, there’s one here that isn’t built on it.