Don't Just Survive Your Workouts But Thrive

Learn why just going hard and finishing a workout may not be the best route. Thrive in your workouts to transfer to race day success.

Stop Surviving Your Workouts: The Truth About OCR Tactical Training

If you've been training for obstacle course races and feel like you're spinning your wheels—working out hard but not seeing real improvements in your race times or performance—this might be the most important thing you read this year.

After over 20 years as a fitness coach and 12 years competing in OCR, I've seen the same pattern repeat itself countless times. Athletes push themselves to exhaustion in every workout, treat training like race day, and wonder why they keep getting injured or hitting the same obstacles over and over again.

The problem isn't that you're not working hard enough. The problem is you're approaching tactical training all wrong.

The Real Truth About OCR Training

Here's what most people don't understand: OCR requires you to be pretty good at a lot of things, not great at just one thing. You don't need to be the fastest runner or the strongest lifter, but you need solid competency across multiple skill sets.

Yet most athletes focus on what they like rather than what they need. They gravitate toward their strengths because those workouts feel good and provide that sense of accomplishment. Meanwhile, their weak links—the things that will actually hold them back on race day—get ignored.

This is where tactical training becomes crucial. It's your opportunity to identify and attack those weaknesses systematically.

The REST System: Your Complete Training Framework

Before we dive into tactical specifics, understand that this is just one piece of a complete system. I call it the REST system:

Recovery - Building resilience and avoiding the injury cycle
Energy Systems Development - Becoming a more efficient runner
Strength Training - Building adequate strength for obstacles
Tactical Training - Race-specific skill development

Most people jump straight to tactical training without laying the proper foundation. That's like trying to build the roof before you've poured the foundation.

Race Day vs. Training Day: The Critical Distinction

This might be the biggest mistake I see athletes make. They treat every workout like race day.

On race day, you do whatever it takes to get to that finish line as fast as possible. You're running on adrenaline, pushing your limits, and yes—you're essentially just trying to survive.

But training day has completely different rules.

In training, the goal isn't how fast you can finish or how much weight you can move regardless of form. The goal is to get better. And you only get better when you pay attention to quality of movement, proper positioning, and building that buffer zone of capability.

When you train sloppy just to "survive" the workout, you're programming your body for injury and inefficiency. You beat yourself up, develop nagging shoulder, knee, and back problems, and wonder why you can't perform when it counts.

The Five Essential Movement Patterns

Every tactical workout should focus on these core patterns that translate directly to race performance:

1. Running

This is obvious but often neglected. The trail is your biggest obstacle—it's where you spend the most time and where you can make up the most ground. If you're training for OCR and not running regularly, you're missing the foundation.

2. Carrying

This shows up in almost every race, and it's where I see the most dysfunction. Most people immediately lose their posture, let their shoulders roll forward, and turn it into an endurance suffer-fest.

Instead, think of carries as a postural exercise. Whether you're using farmers carries, front-loaded carries, or unilateral carries (like sandbags), the rules are the same:

Maintain neutral grip
Keep shoulders in good position
Don't let the weight pull you out of alignment
Focus on how well you can hold position, not just distance

3. Crawling

You might not bear crawl in a race—you might army crawl or roll—but bear crawl training develops the coordination between upper body, lower body, and core that directly transfers to climbing, running efficiency, and hanging obstacles.

The key is opposite arm, opposite leg movement under control with a rock-solid core. Most people let their hips shoot up and sway side to side. Instead, think of it as a moving plank where you're driving hands and feet into the ground while your core holds everything together.

4. Climbing

This develops the pulling strength and coordination you need for walls, rope climbs, and traverses. Focus on efficient movement patterns and building the specific strength these obstacles demand.

5. Hanging

This is where technique makes or breaks you. Most people hang from their joint structures instead of the muscles that support those joints. When you just "dead hang," you're setting yourself up for shoulder injuries and failure.

Instead, keep your shoulders connected to your body and engage your core like you're doing a hollow hold. You should look like a plank hanging vertically, not a limp noodle.

Start with basic hangs, progress to bent-arm hangs, then work transitions like single-arm hangs and re-gripping patterns that mimic monkey bar movements.

Programming Your Tactical Training

Here's the critical part most people miss: tactical training is intense and demanding. You can't do it every day.

Start with one tactical session per week. Make it challenging enough that you need time to recover, but focus on quality over just grinding through. As your fitness improves and you can recover faster, you might add a second session.

The beauty of tactical training is that you can get creative with combinations and transitions. Maybe you struggle going from running into an obstacle and then back to running. Design workouts that specifically target those transitions.

Test your gear, try your race-day nutrition strategies, even get up early to simulate race morning conditions. This is where you work out the kinks before they cost you on race day.

The Bottom Line

Stop treating every workout like you're just trying to survive. Start training with intention, focusing on the movement patterns and skills that will actually make you better on race day.

Remember: the work you do in the gym should translate to better race performance. If it's not, you need to re-evaluate your approach.

Your tactical training should challenge your weaknesses, develop race-specific skills, and create that buffer zone of capability so that when race day comes, you're not just surviving—you're thriving.

Ready to take your OCR training to the next level? I've put together a comprehensive mini-course that dives deeper into everything we covered here, plus sample tactical and simulation workouts for both OCR and hybrid events.

The OCR & Hybrid Tactical and Simulation Training Program includes detailed programming strategies, nutrition guidance, and race-day preparation protocols that will help you finally see the improvements you've been working toward.

Don't keep spinning your wheels with random hard workouts. Get the system that actually works.

Categories: : OCR Training, Tactical Training