“Jacked & Tan”: 6 Weeks of Functional Strength & Athletic Muscle

Monday kicks off our new cycle, “Jacked & Tan”, a fully structured 6-week training cycle designed to help you get stronger in your major lifts, increase work capacity without sacrificing recovery or burning out, and of course…build functional, athletic muscle.

Whether you want to increase your lifts, PR for a Hyrox, or finally break out of the daily cardio rut, “Jacked & Tan” will deliver the exact training stimulus it needs to adapt, grow, and perform.

BUT FIRST, A REFRESHER ON THE BENEFITS OF BUILDING MUSCLE

First, we’re not talking about bulking up like a bodybuilder. Our approach to muscle building typically focuses more on the athletic kind of development, the Type-II muscle built in the 5-8R range that typically yields strong, more defined muscle as opposed to inflated, puffy muscle.

Here are a few reasons why adding functional muscle will help you.

You Will Live Longer
The amount of lean body mass you have is directly proportionate to our life expectancy. The easiest way to thwart off the needing to have it when you’re older? Develop it when you’re younger.

Soft Tissue Function & Symmetry
Isolation work and sub-maximal work on the big barbell lifts in the range of 40 – 60% of your one rep max can improve the health and function of our joints, tendons and ligaments. Further, isolating muscles also creates better symmetry in the body, and we know that a leading cause of sports injury is asymmetry among large muscle groups. Especially for runners and endurance athletes.

You Burn More Calories
Muscle is the most calorically active tissue in the human body, meaning lean muscle mass increases your resting metabolic rate. The more lean body mass we have, the more calories we burn. Even more importantly, building muscle mass increases your storage capacity for glucose. Muscle acts like a sponge — the more you have, the more carbs you can eat without spiking blood sugar or storing fat. Strength training also reduces visceral fat, which is strongly linked to insulin resistance and inflammation.

Improved Endurance
Building muscle is going to allow you to sustain higher fitness outputs for longer. The more muscle we have, the more phoshocreatine potential we have for immediate power use, and the more glycogen we have for prolonged endurance output. Not to mention, the more higher ratios of muscle we have proportionate to total body weight, the more our aerobic endurance will improve, as well. We are essentially increasing the capacity and size of our engine.

Strength Improvement for Advanced Trainees
The further you progress along the curve, the more important hypertrophy work becomes in order to continue progressing your strength gains. At the onset of a program, most of your strength gains occur at the neuromuscular level. That is, our body and brain working together more efficiently to perform heavier movement. However, once you’re past a certain point your body is no longer going to adapt like it once did and you need to focus on strength from a structural level, that is, building the muscle and soft tissue.

It’s also very important to build muscle as you continue to train for strength, because that hypertrophy work will help you prevent injury.

You Get More DMs
Unofficial research confirms this. Muscle makes you look good and your inbox gets more active.

A GREAT TIME TO FOCUS ON YOUR STRENGTH

We might not have a bigger pet peeve than how free and loose the industry throws around the term “strength.” A 45 minute workout with twelve movements is not strength training. Any workout that involves a treadmill for half the class is not strength training. Pilates, while great and unique in its own way, is not strength training. We’ll say it. Barbells are the overwhelmingly superior choice for it simply because they allow for the most efficient loading of the weight needed to drive a strength stimulus.

In that spirit, here are the benefits of focusing on your barbell strength for the next six weeks.

Improves Performance
Strength training improves power, speed, coordination, and core stability. Movements like the deadlift or back squat build foundational strength that boosts performance in running, jumping, and any sport-specific movement.

More Athletic Body Composition
When you train with low reps and heavy weight, think 1–6 reps at 75–95% of your 1-rep max, you’re primarily targeting your Ttype-II muscle fibers, also known as fast-twitch fibers. Compared to slow-twitch (Type I) fibers that grow through a trauma response of positive stress, type-ii fibers grow by increasing their motor units, resulting in a more athletic physique profile.

Improves Insulin Sensitivity
Your body’s ability to use carbs effectively for energy instead of storing them as fat.

When you lift weights past the 5R range, your muscles demand glucose to fuel contractions. This creates an immediate spike in insulin sensitivity that can last up to 48 hours post-workout. Over time, consistent strength training increases GLUT-4 activity (the proteins that shuttle glucose into muscle cells), making your body better at clearing sugar from the bloodstream which decreases your chances of storing it as fat.

Unlike crash diets or cardio-only approaches, building strength creates lasting metabolic improvements. You gain muscle, lose fat, and make your body more efficient at processing nutrients.

Increases Confidence
Look, we’ve been doing this for fifteen years. We don’t know everything, but we know a lot. And one fact that’s concrete is that getting stronger makes you more confident. And who knows where that confidence manifests itself in your life.

HOW ENDURANCE ATHLETES (AHEM, HYROX) WILL BENEFIT

If you’re training for HYROX, OCR, or endurance events, this program is especially needed for you to reach your peak performance.

Strength = Efficiency
The stronger you are, the less energy each rep costs. This is known as economy of movement and is paramount to your time on the course.

Muscle = Durability
Underdeveloped muscle imbalances yields a higher injury risk, and of the best ways to correct muscle imbalance is through isolation work and compound movements performed at challenging, but sub maximal reps.

Conditioning = Competitive Edge
The conditioning aspects of our burst style of conditioning will push your lactate threshold, VO₂ max, and ability to stay powerful under fatigue.

Programming = Performance Longevity
A full week is structured to balance movement patterns, prevent overuse, and support your existing endurance plan without burning you out.

Too many endurance athletes falsely only focus on cardio.

WEEKLY TRAINING STRUCTURE

Each day will feature a unique balance between intensity, recovery, and progression, which is critical if you want muscle growth and strength without stalling out or overtraining. Keep in mind that like always with Performance360, there will be other muscle groups included beyond what the daily focus is – we aren’t a bodybuilding gym, so we always want to keep it functional and well rounded.

MONDAY – Lower Body Strength (Back Squat Focus)

Big compound lifts. Controlled rest. You’ll train the back squat and its variations to build maximal strength through neuromuscular efficiency. Expect progressive loading strategies, including tempo work, contrast sets, and of course building up to the opportunity to develop your one rep.

What it develops:
Global strength with the universal ability to produce force under load, functional muscle.

TUESDAY – Upper Body Hypertrophy (Push Focus)

This is where we accumulate volume and drive metabolic stress — two of the primary mechanisms of hypertrophy. You’ll work through supersets, controlled eccentrics, banded work, and time-under-tension sets for shoulders, chest, and triceps.

What it develops:
Muscle aesthetics, joint resilience, and definition in the “mirror muscles” without sacrificing function.

WEDNESDAY – Max Intensity Conditioning (Total Body)

These will be total body efforts to split up the week and will take full advantage of the time we have available for each workout. Anaerobic power meets aerobic force development. You’ll hit short, brutal intervals some weeks, others we’ll use barbells to improve your aerobic output, and some days we’ll just flat out attack your VO₂ max and lactate threshold with timed explosive intervals.

What it develops:
Improved energy system efficiency, body comp benefits, and a killer engine without long slogs.

THURSDAY – Upper Body Strength (Pull Focus)

The contrast to our Tuesday, Thursdays will follow a similar approach but will target opposing muscle groups. This day focuses on vertical and horizontal pulling with barbells, dumbbells, and bodyweight to build a stronger upper back, biceps, and grip (which is high key critical for performance and posture.)

What it develops:
Raw strength, upper body power production, and backside muscle that supports everything else you do.

FRIDAY – Lower Body Hypertrophy (Hinge Focus)

Friday is about building the posterior chain — your glutes, hamstrings, and hinge pattern movements. Expect high-volume deadlift variations, hip thrusts, single-leg work, and finishers designed to increase muscle fiber recruitment and keep the tension where it matters.

What it develops:
Muscle growth in the glutes and hamstrings, power endurance, and improved athleticism.

A NOTE ON CONDITIONING

While the overall focus of these six weeks will be on strength and muscle, we of course will still maintain regular dosing of conditioning. Each workout will finish with high intensity conditioning effort, and Wednesday will feature conditioning workouts exclusively.

WEEKLY PROGRESSION OVERVIEW

Each week of Jacked & Tan is structured to layer stimulus in a way that drives consistent adaptation — without plateauing or burning out.

Week	Focus	Purpose
1	Base Building	Establish movement quality, set loads, and prepare joints/tissues
2	Wave Loading	Increase intensity, challenge CNS, build raw strength
3	Tempo & Tension	Increase time under tension, improve fiber recruitment
4	Contrast Sets	Increase rate of force development
5	Ramp Up	Begin intensifying loads and density across all lifts
6	Peak Week	Express your new strength and muscle gains with high-performance sets

Wave Loading
This is another term for a Pyramid but is slightly different because we spend more time at each rep count, and we cover less reps. For example, 5-5-3-3-3 Back Squat is what wave loading looks like. The variation in intensity forces your CNS to stay highly engaged. This increases your rate of force development and explosive strength output.

Tempo & Tension
By manipulating how much time we spend in certain phases of the movement, we are able to place greater stress on either the “eccentric” (lowering) or “concentric” (lifting), or “isometric” (paused) phase, yielding different benefits for each. An example of this would be a “Tempo Back Squat @ 31×0”, where the numbers correspond to a prescription for how long we spend in each part of the movement.

Contrast Sets
This is where we combine a heavy strength movement with a light, explosive movement to train both maximal force and rate of force development. Something like a back squat into a box jumps, where the goal is to take advantage of post-activation potentiation (PAP) — where lifting heavy “primes” the nervous system for improved power output.