Shut Up And Ruck: The Field Annex

THERE IS SOMETHING

WRONG WITH YOU

You have the perfect excuse to sit around and do nothing. It’s a flawless justification. You’re in training. You’re busy. Why look for more work?!? But there is something wrong with you. So you decided that you wanted to fill your limited free time with scuffing yourself up. You got this book because you are headed off to some austere location and you wanted to keep pushing yourself. You are either at OSUT, or in the field, or sequestered in some remote cabin in the hinterland on a Federal Witness Protection scenario. This is the perfect chance to just do nothing. Nobody would judge you, except you. The only reasonable conclusion is that there is something wrong with you.

Good. Let’s weaponize that.

You got this Field Annex because good enough isn’t good enough. You have standards and they exceed the bare minimum. You want to be acommando. So while it’s perfectly acceptable to do what the rest of the pack is doing, you want to run with a better pack. You likely found yourself with this book in your hands because you followed Shut Up and Ruck. You spent months grinding through one of the most intense training regimens imaginable. You ran more Zone 2 than any normal human would likely endure. You built calluses like lobster claws on your palms from all the heavy lifting. You rucked so much that it became a welcome friend rather than something to be avoided. You dialed in your diet and your hydration, you optimized your sleep hygiene and your recovery, and you fought for months to build yourself into a formidable force. And you’re not giving that status up easily.

But now you’re in lockdown. Somebody else is in charge of the schedule and it’s a tight schedule. If it’s a collective training environment, then most things get reduced to the lowest common denominator…and there are some very low denominators. So everything is conspiring to dull you. Suboptimal workouts, bad sleep, poor nutrition, and competing priorities. You don’t even have access to weights, much less a full gym. You need help. You need a plan.

That’s where the Field Annex picks up. We have developed a 20-week plan to keep you sharp. We’re battling against some pretty powerful forces here. First, is atrophy. As you learned in Shut Up and Ruck, it takes 5-7 weeks for physiological adaptations to begin to manifest. To begin to manifest. You remember how long it took for you to get your Zone 2 pacing dialed in. You remember how much your Bench Press struggled on those last few reps. It took far longer than 5-7 weeks to get there, but it starts to atrophy within just two weeks. You spent months in hypertrophy, so atrophy isn’t acceptable! Months to build, weeks to lose. We want to break that as much as possible.

The other force we’re battling is the thing staring you right in the face. If you’re in field, then that’s the priority. You’ve got missions to manage and people to lead. You’re likely on a hard routine, poor sleep, MREs, and baby wipe whore baths. So getting all lathered up isn’t high on your priority list. If you’re in OSUT then you are in deep water. You’re learning to be a Soldier and that is no small task. And you have these sadistic bastards, let’s call them Drill Sergeants, who seem determined to make you learn. They have bad attitudes, but with good intentions. And they are relentless. If you’re in the Federal Witness Protection scenario, then let’s all just agree that you’re innocent and move along from there. But we’re battling with some competing priorities.

The underlying factors in all of these things are resources. You have a thousand and one things competing for your time, so you must be efficient. If we can squeeze in an hour a day we're lucky. You don’t have access to the stuff that you had before. No squat racks and bumper plates, no cold plunges and saunas, and no supplements and therapy items. Andyour attention, your cognitive load, is probably through the roof right now. You’re trying to remember the last OPORD or your 3 General Orders. You’re trying not to get ambushed by the OPFOR, your Drill Sergeants, or the Gambino crime family. You don’t have an abundance of spare brain power to program workouts and contemplate strategies. You need a quick, efficient, low overhead solution to help you keep your edge until you can get back to civilization.

So that’s what we built. This Field Annex has everything that you need. We have a couple of things going for us. First, we have you. You are deeply, intrinsically motivated. We don’t need to give you a bunch of hype to convince you to train. You’re already a True Believer. Second, we have TFVooDoo. TFVooDoo started as a random generated username and has grown into a network of trainers, coaches, and experts across every domain that you need. We have been exactly where you are. We know what needs to be done, because we’ve done it. And finally, we have the "system". The military is a system, so it’s predictable. We don’t have perfect intel on every facet of your daily regimen. But we are systems thinkers, and we know the system. We're going to use that to your advantage.

That’s the plan. This Field Annex is going to give you hyper-efficient, exquisitely programmed, low overhead training that will keep you fit, functional, and moving forward. Everything you need is either in your ruck, your wall locker, or this book. We even have a 20-week performance journal to keep track of it all. We thought of everything, so you don’t have to. You are the weapon; we’re just going to aim it and pull the trigger.

Ready…aim…fire!