Article by Glenn Cranham B.Sc

For those of you that are a little longer in the tooth, you may well have heard of the 300 workout, that was used to train up the amazing physiques of the actors in the film 300.

The 300 workout was designed by Mark Twight, a record holding mountain climber and lead personal trainer of Gym Jones in Salt Lake City, Utah.

It’s actually a 5/6 day gruelling training regime that paired with sound nutrition whipped them in to shape.

The workout that’s become famous was actually the test they used to assess their level of fitness during training, but it became popular as a workout and there are many video’s online of people undertaking it. The current record is viewable here: 

I’ve been using it recently as an inter-client challenge to motivate my clients and it’s certainly got them working harder. We spent 4 weeks doing the workout once per week to prepare for the final test. The first 2 weeks we mostly just concentrated on good form and establishing the rules for the technique. This may differ from trainer to trainer, and my rules are below. The first one to three weeks we did the full workout but in two halves. Then week 4 we did a 30/20 split for the 50 rep exercises and 15/10 for the 25 rep exercises. So not quite equal halves. The 5th week was the full test in one go. I have added start and end pictures of the floor wipers. I think you will know the rest of the exercises but if not, shout! we have the pictures. 

The Rules

I don’t allow any kipping on the pull ups, the eyes must come above the bar and the arms fully extend at the bottom.

The deadlift must be to full extension through the hips and knees and the plates must make contact for each rep.

The push ups are with arms at 1.5 times shoulder width and the chest must make contact with my knuckles with my hand in a pronated position.

The box jumps must have the whole of the foot landing on the box and the client must stand up on each reps. No bent knees here!

The floor wipers are with straight legs that touch the plate on each rep, and the floor at the bottom.

The kettlebell clean and press must touch the floor and have full arm extension.

The client can take as much rest as they want whenever they want, but they can’t move on to the next exercise until they have completed all the reps.

As I’m pretty strict, this does make it a little harder and it does affect how close they get to the record. But I reckon anything under 25 minutes is a good effort.

The 300 Test (in metric)

50 Deadlifts with 60kg

50 Box Jumps with 60cm Box

50 Floor Wipers with the 60kg bar

50 Single Arm KB Clean & Press 16kg (25 each arm)

25 Pull Ups 

Enjoy!