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- Fitness and Mental Health – How it Helps and How it Goes Bad
- Kettlebells Transform Your Body Unlike ANYTHING Else – Huge Benefits Explained
- How Sitting, Stress, and Clothes Destroy Our Bodies
- Why Steroids Are NOT Functional – Don’t Trade Your Health for Muscle
- How to Keep Leveling Up INFINITELY – Like Sung Jin-Woo
- The Ideal Physique is Easy for Most Guys When They Learn This – Toji Workout
- How to Train Your FOOT Muscles for Balance, Power, & Injury Prevention
- How to Do Sit Ups CORRECTLY for Ripped, Powerful Abs
- How to Train Your Nervous System Like a NINJA
Guts Workout: Train Like GUTS From Berserk
If you’re just looking for the workout, you can get the PDF HERE. Otherwise, read on and enjoy!
For a looong time now, you guys have been requesting I create a workout based on Guts from Berserk. I was a little reluctant at first – knowing nothing about the character – but eventually my curiosity got the better of me. Turns out you guys have a good eye for this stuff becuaus Guts is a perfect candidate for the Bioneer treatment!
So, I bought this gigantic faux-leather omnibus of the manga, watched some excellent videos by Super Eyepatch Wolf, and dove in.
I have a pretty good job…
What I discovered was an awesome action epic with insanely cool art and really deep character work. I don’t normally read stories that get quite this dark but I’m loving the Eldrich horror element and it’s clear to see its inspiration in modern works that resonate with me, like Dark Souls.
More importantly, Guts is, in many ways, an ideal example of funcional strength. He doesn’t look like a bodybuilder with a V-taper or a narrow little waist, rather he has the thick torso of an old-time strongman. This is what allows him to wield his infamously-massive sword, The Dragon Slayer.
I just love it when an artist intuitively understands the physique that best suits a character!
So, why does this make so much sense?
Well, the reason old-time strongmen had thicker waists is because they trained their obliques more than most modern lifters. Without access to the cushy equipment we have at the gym today, they instead would lift uneven objects with no comfortable grip, often at unusual angles. Think barrells, rocks, and barbells with wide bars and no racks to hold them.
There was literally a lift called the “anyhow lift”!
Old-time strongmen were constantly twisting, bending laterally, and generally moving in the frontal and rotational plane. As such, they developed thicker waists and barrell chests – something that we lost when we switched to standardised lifts and started chasing “aesthetics.”
It’s so strange to me that male beauty standards prefer the comparatively frail look of an itty bitty waist. Of course, I believe you should look however you want – that’s the beauty of working out. It’s just surprising that a culture seemingly obsessed with masculinity and power should actively aim to stop important muscles from growing.
If you want to look and move like a powerful warrior – if you want to look like Guts – you need a thick, powerful waist to go with it.
Progressive Overload With a Massive Sword
So, how did Guts get all that power in his core?
Simple: by swinging massive swords around since he was a kid.
The sword actually has fascinating character significance, too. You see, Guts was adopted by a mercenary called Gambino after his adoptive mother passed away who started training him at the young age of six.
Gambino didn’t bother to get Guts a sword his own size, though, so Guts had to adapt and develop the strength necessary to wield weapons meant for adults. Seeing as that’s all he ever knew, fighting with giant swords became Guts’ unique style.
Thanks to Super Eyepatch Wolf’s video for spotting that cool bit of character building! I also like how this whole concept turns the idea of the master and apprentice on its head, subverting the trope.
But what Guts maybe didn’t appreciate at the time, was that he was observing smart training principles! The first being progressive overload: instead of “growing into” his sword, it just kept getting bigger and bigger. Like Milo of Croton who, according to myth, would carry a baby calf every day until it grew into a cow.
If you keep increasing the weight as you get stronger, you will keep getting stronger.
Rotate to Devastate
The other principle Guts learned this way is specificity.
If you want to get better at swinging a sword, you need to train by swinging a sword. Simply building strength might increase your power just slightly, but the transfer of skill will always be limited.
Guts’ training would have developed incredible grip strength, core strength, rotational strength, and more.
This is what is so often missing from modern training. Powerlifting and bodybuilding are immensely good for you. They’ll build muscle and power, strengthen your bones, and more. But, if you’re only doing the big lifts or training the classic mirror muscles, then you’ll miss out on strengthening the swinging and rotating muscles that are used in fighting, labour, sports, and more.
In fact, you might even start to lose the ability to move naturally and fluidly in the rotational plane!
I know this because it happened to me. It’s why my punches looked so awkward for so long. It even contributed to lower back pain that I endured for years.
This is a topic that fellow-YouTuber Nsima Inyang has been talking about a lot lately. Nsima comes from a powerlifting background but he, too, found that his movement was becoming increasingly stiff and rigid. In a recent video he uses a clip of a massive bodybuilder walking down the street with almost zero contralateral movement in their gait. This is simply the result of training the muscles to produce force in the sagittal plane, only. Of placing increasingly large axial load on the spine and bracing against it.
This WILL inhibit your movement, eventually.
People who have dedicated their lives these types of training often push back against this iconvenient truth. They don’t want to feel as though the training they dedicated their lives to is lacking in anyway.
But this isn’t a criticism of bodybuilding or powerlifting. It is simply to say: no one type of training offers everything. You need a variety. Because the reality is simple: if you don’t practice moving in a certain way, you lose it. And if you practice moving in only one way, over and over again, you will become imbalanced.
Stability and Movement IQ
Nsima didn’t stop weightlifting, he just added more practices: Rope Flow, kettlebell flows, and more. And if you watch him now, it’s like poetry in motion.
For my own part, adding rotational movements with clubs and kettlebells made me feel so much more powerful and fluid. It doesn’t have to be anything complicated either: just a few Atlas swings and kettlebell halos make a world of difference.
Look into the “cast” family of movements, like the gama cast, shield cast, and kettlebell halo. I’ve been using these a lot lately and I love the way they stretch the lats, open up the shoulders, and strengthen the triceps, lats, and core, all at the same time. You need to brace the core to prevent yourself from bending back (extending the spine) and flaring the ribs.
I highly recommend Mark Wildman’s channel, where you can find a ton of great information on these techniques.
What’s more, is that these movements teach you the swinging/throwing/serape pattern that is so important for functional performance. Plus, they teach you to perform those movements on both sides of the body.
If you only ever throw or punch or swing on one side this can lead to serious imbalances – a common problem for throwing athletes. This is a nuanced topic, though, given that some preference for one side of the body is normal (due to the fact that we are heavier on one side, among other things). This is called “functional asymmetry” and I go into it in a little more depth in my video on training the psoas.
Using these movements won’t only build mobility and power in the transverse plane, they also develop leverage, stability, and supporting musculature. Staying in flow and moving gracefully against weight is about learning to create opportunities in your body. It’s about finding the leverage points, creating structure, stabilising your core.
Without practice, these awkward movements can be difficult even for someone very strong. Swinging a kettlebell, a club, or a giant sword prepares you for resistance at almost any angle. And, as a result, it translates even better to the real world and real tests of strength.
Just swinging that massive sword around would be enough to turn Guts into an absolute monster. Especially given the frequency and intensity – and given that he did it from a very young age.
Another YouTuber, Jax Blade, actually has a “real” Dragon Slayer sword, insofar as it is genuinely very heavy. In videos where Jax started heaving the thing about, you could see him working to find leverage at different angles.
He even says how it “works muscles he never knew he had.”
And that’s precisely it: you don’t train these positions, you don’t build strength there.
THIS is what functional training is. It’s not claiming that certain types of training “aren’t functional.” It’s not about excluding things. Rather, it’s about creating a well-rounded training profile. It’s about adding the things that otherwise get overlooked.
And, if we want to move like Guts, that means adding rotation into the mix.
The Endurance… To ENDURE
So far, we know that we need to train with awkward shapes and angles and we need to work the rotational plane. By using clubs, ropes, kettlebells, and other unconventional tools, we can emulate the effect that Guts’ giant sword would have on his body.
Likewise, to look and move like Guts, you’re going to need a ton of endurance. Being able to swing a massive club or sword around over your head is an immense demonstration of power and poise. However, to be actually useful, you need to be able to do that for more than a couple of minutes at a time!
In the manga, Guts often battles undead oponents who constantly regenerate. Challenging his determination and endurance.
Not only that, but Guts walks around carrying a huge amount of heavy gear. He has the massive sword, of course, but he also wears giant armour (including the Berserker Armour – more on that in a moment).
This is another reason that kettlebell training and club training work so well. These modalities lend themselves to huge rep-ranges that fall somewhere between cardio and resistance training.
On top of this, we should also consider loaded carries – literally carrying large items like kettlebells in one or both hands, for time.
Grab a kettlebell or a club and walk for a mile, stopping to rest only when you absolutely need to. Your traps, core, and grip will be screaming by the end. And if you train one side at a time (with a suitcase carry) you’ll also be strengthening that anti-lateral flexion, building even bigger obliques.
This type of training is ideal in terms of specificity. Carrying something really heavy around is exactly what Guts does. And that means you also get to feel like Guts in the process.
Finalising The Guts Workout
Combine these movements with the afforementioned weighted carries and with more standard forms of heavy lifting (the big three) to build tree trunk legs with pushing and pulling power. Voila! You have an incredible workout for looking AND moving like Guts. Oh, and I also recommend training for strength and mobility in the wrists.
Of course, for the best results, you should also combine this with some kind of actual weapon training. That could mean HEMA or something else. I actually did fencing for for a few months when I was much younger and it was a ton of fun.
This will teach you to apply that power and movement in a useful way and it will develop other things, too, such as the necessary footwork and focus.
The Psychology of Guts: Going Berserk
Finally, I don’t think we can call this a complete analysis of Guts’ training without a note on the psychological aspect.
Despite having pretty much the worst luck in fiction, Guts is a character who keeps going and doesn’t give up. Even when he’s lying broken in a pool of his own blood, only able to move a single finger, he still keeps fighting.
Eventually, Guts receives the Berserker Armour. This unlocks his true strength and power by removing the psychological barriers that normally prevent someone from accessing their true potential. These barriers are somewhat based on real physiology. Our bodies do, in fact, prevent us from accessing 100% of our muscle fibre in order to conserver energy and prevent injury.
The Berserker Armour induces a mad bloodlust in the wearer and forces them to push past their limits, even pinning together injured limbs and broken bones so they can keep fighting. This, of course, exerts a huge toll on a fighter and is extremely risky to use. Like all good anime upgrades, there is a cost:benefit calculation that needs to be made each time it is used.
What’s interesting about the Berserk armour, is that it is based on real legends of Nordic Warriors entering a state known as “Berserkgang.” This state would allegedly give them access to insane strength and power, alongside a frenzied rage. Berserkers were said to become so enraged that their faces would appear red and disfigured. They would bite into their own shields, howl like wild animals, and fight shirtless.
Since then, we’ve heard similar urban legends of mothers unlocking superhuman strength to lift cars off of their trapped children. Whether these stories are true is uncertain at best, but there are enough similar cases for us to know that something is up.
The general consensus is that this is the result of massive surges in testosterone. This allows for greater muscle fibre recruitment, pain tolerance, and focus. And, in the case of the Nordic warriors, this might have been achieved with the help of rituals or naturally occurring psychoactive substances (such as fungi).
How can we apply this to our own, real-world training?
For one, it does show just how psychological strength and performance really are, and why sports psychology is so important.
Many athletes and gym rats use caffeine and even smelling salts to achieve a similar boost in strength at the gym – allowing for bigger lifts and tougher workouts.
But I would caution against this. I would remind you that Guts, while cool, is not an aspirational character in this sense. He is a deeply broken and wounded man, who has not a lot to live for.
Forcing ourselves to perform beyond our limits by using large doses of caffeine is potentially harmful in the long run. It makes us tense and prone to injury. Over time, we may become increasingly dependent. And it could lead to other issues like elevated heart rate, stress, and insomnia.
The true art is not to trigger this crazed state with drugs, but to pick and choose the mental state you want to achieve and to get there naturally. Through breathing techniques, metacognition, and other strategies.
And, just as importantly, to be able to calm your nervous system back down afterwards.
To achieve the kind of mastery that lets you feel calm and collected when resting, but locked in and amped up when necessary.
And maybe that’s a video for another time.
***
Meanwhile, let me know what I missed. How would you approach training like Guts from Berserk? Are you a fan of club or mace training?
If you like the idea of training for functional movement and performance, I recommend my premium training program and ebook: SuperFunctional Training 2.0. It’s designed to build the kind of strength in combination with explosiveness, proprioception, mobility, and endurance that you would actually need to move like any of these anime heroes. It comes with a full program that can be adapted to any level and doesn’t require any specialist equipment; plus over 2 hours of instructional video and an 80+ page ebook!
SuperFunctional Training 2.0
SuperFunctional Training 2.0: The Protean Performance System. This is a comprehensive book, video course, and more that aims to improve every aspect of human performance.
Either way guys, thanks so much for reading this one… and bye for now!
I had a Viking sword, which is very blade heavy, and it bumped up my forearm strength A LOT when I used it every day on a target.
I’d love to see your experience with rice bucket training since your already a beast when it comes to muscle strength- 30 days would tell us peons if it works for forearm strength and size.
Btw I love your format- you are the ideal for normies trying to find the best way to increase gains for minimal effort
How do you get the Bioneer to notice your comment?
Hi Bioneer, would you recommend following the superfunctional training book for a skinny very fat man? If not, what do you recommend doing first before reading the book? Thanks!
Hi Bioneer, for the release of the new Fantastic Four movie, are you planning on creating a workout around it, like you used to do for superheroes? I would approach it by creating a plan where you train for 4 days a week, and each day you do 4 exercises. Each exercise represents a member of the Fantastic Four as a pillar of fitness; Mr. Fantastic is flexibility/mobility, the human torch is speed/endurance, the Thing is strength/durability, and the invisible woman (the most variable pillar) could represent agility or reflexes but you can just assign her the pillar you think aligns with her abilities the best. Now, since the Fantastic Four is a family and don’t stand separately, each day has 4 exercises and each member will have an exercise that aligns with their pillar, so that you’re training all 4 of them on all 4 days instead of giving each pillar their own specific day. I`d love it if you could make this a full-length video if this idea seems interesting to you.
How do you get the Bioneer to notice your comment?