Nothing says, “Excuse me,” like a roundhouse kick to the face

November 27, 2016, at 12:57 p.m. You want to want to work out, right? Of course you do. Or at least you would like to want to work out. Maybe you have no reason to, most men don’t think they do. It’s very likely you’re either married, never been in great shape, like drinking booze to much or you eat like a college kid.

All reasons many guys don’t go to a gym. All of these things describe me. But, I still have a least one reason to hit the gym a couple times a week. Training for a bar fight.

Tough fighting lessons learned as a bar bouncer

I worked on the weekends as a bouncer in college. This gave me a little insight into bar fighting. The basics of a bar fight are very straightforward and can be split into two components, offense and defense. First, you need to be aware that if you’re in a bar fight it’s very likely you are drunk.

This means when you get hit it’s not going to hurt as much as it normally would. This is good for us, but it also benefits our opponent. Since we are drunk and likely not feeling much we can disregard defense.

Second and most important we will need to be strong on offense. The key to winning almost every bar fight I have been in or seen is who can exert the most brute force, quickly. Whether this is via a punch, shove, throw, or tackle it makes no real difference to our workout.

All of these moves will be strengthened using the same routine. What we are looking to do is to implement a training regimen that focuses on developing functional strength while also keeping it incredibly simple.

With this is mind we are going to do a few things, or not do rather, in our workout that are not wildly popular. Mainly, forgetting about building showy and well defined muscles that look good at the beach but have little relevance to our goal. Like the biceps for example. Who likes the beach anyway? I sure don’t. Beer won’t stay cold and I never fail to get sand in the crack of my ass.

We are focusing only on compound movements in this workout. Those are exercises that utilize multiple muscle groups. Primarily large muscle groups and their support muscles. The four lifts in our repertoire will all be done with a barbell. They are the squat, dead lift, standing overhead press, and bench press. More good news, we are only going to the gym two days a week and only doing two different lifts each time.

Bar Fight Training Schedule

For our purposes, we will assume that the majority of our bar fighting is done on Friday and Saturday nights. This means we will train on Monday and Wednesday. If you need to adjust accordingly, so be it. Just make sure you have at least one rest day before a bar fight.

I won’t be going into teaching you how to do the movements. If you don’t know, search for the exercise.

Also, if you have never lifted weights in your life, or if it’s been awhile, do yourself a favor and use little to no weight on these lifts for the first few weeks. Going too heavy to early will make you sore beyond belief, and you’ll probably quit.

The workout is broken down into two days. Workout A and B. Workout A is done on Monday and workout B on Wednesday. This will give you as much time as possible to be recovered by the time your Friday night fight rolls around.

Do yourself another favor and ensure you’re adequately warmed up for each movement. Do a few reps with no weight then progressing to about half your working weight. Add in some light cardio and that should do the trick.

Bar Fight Workout A

Five sets of five reps: Barbell Bench Press

Five sets of three reps: Barbell Dead Lift

Bar Fight Workout B

Five sets of five reps: Barbell Squat

Five sets of three reps: Standing Overhead Press

The aim in this workout is to go up in the amount of weight that is lifted each week. Five pounds at a time ideally. If you hit all the sets and all the reps, add five pounds to the bar the next week. Unless you did it very easily then you can add ten.

You will find the first couple of months doing this workout you will make huge gains in strength, especially in the squat and dead lift. Be sure you take two or three minutes of rest between sets even if you don’t feel winded. Rest is your friend when you’re lifting for strength.

DISCLAIMER: This workout is not for you if you want to get abs, lose weight, or have a big peak in your biceps. That is not what we are trying to accomplish. What it will do is provide big gains in the strength department. Which will translate nicely to your punches, kicks, shoves, and the most ravaging bar fight move of all: The Titty Twister.

Even if you don’t plan on getting into a bar fight anytime soon. This will at least have you more physically prepared for one. Maybe you don’t plan on getting into any fight ever. First of all, shame on you. Until you’ve bloodied another man’s face, can you really say you’ve lived? Secondly, I would like to tell you about this place. But the first rule is, I can’t talk about it.

OK, you got me. This isn’t an article about a bar fight workout at all. It’s a recruitment flier for fight club.