King Kong
One of the most demanding functional fitness workouts ever created. Superhuman strength required.
- Format
- For Time
- Time cap
- 20 mins
- Level
- elite
For Time
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King Kong is a for-time workout by Fiz, built from 4 movements, with a 20 mins cap. It is set at elite level.
About King Kong
King Kong is three rounds of one very heavy deadlift, two muscle-ups, three heavy squat cleans and four handstand push-ups. Ten reps of work per round, thirty in total, and it is one of the hardest tests in the catalogue.
A strength benchmark disguised as a metcon
The rep counts are tiny and the loads are enormous, which inverts everything about how a workout like this normally reads. The deadlift is near a one-rep maximum for most people who attempt it as written, and the squat cleans are heavier than many athletes' best single. That means this is not a conditioning test that happens to be heavy: it is a strength test that asks whether you can express near-maximal strength three times, with gymnastics in between, without the barbell numbers falling apart.
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Treat every rep as a lift, not a rep
There is no cycling here and no rhythm to find. Approach each deadlift and each clean as a separate attempt: set up properly, brace, lift, walk away. Rushing back to the bar because the clock is running is how a heavy squat clean becomes a missed squat clean, and a miss at this load costs several minutes of confidence as well as time. The muscle-ups and handstand push-ups are the recovery, which is a strange sentence to write and is nonetheless how the workout is paced by everyone who does it well.
What's a good King Kong time
Very few athletes complete this as written, so the honest benchmark is different from other entries here: finishing at all is the achievement. Under ten minutes is exceptional and under fifteen is very strong. If the prescribed loads are out of reach, scale them to something around ninety percent of your own best single rather than to a moderate weight, because the whole character of this workout comes from the bar being genuinely heavy relative to you.