Murph
A Hero WOD honoring Navy Lieutenant Michael Murphy, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2005. Perform all reps wearing a 20lb vest for the Rx version.
- Format
- For Time
- Time cap
- 1 hour
- Level
- elite
For Time
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Open in FizMurph is a for time workout by Fiz, built from 5 movements, with a 1 hour cap. It is set at elite level.
About Murph
Murph is a memorial workout, and it is worth knowing what you are doing before you do it. It honours Navy Lieutenant Michael Murphy, killed in Afghanistan in June 2005 while deliberately exposing his own position to call for help for his team. It was his favourite training session, and it is traditionally performed once a year on Memorial Day — though athletes test themselves against it year-round.
The workout, and why the order matters
The structure is a mile run, one hundred pull-ups, two hundred push-ups, three hundred air squats, and another mile run. The prescribed version is done wearing a weight vest. The middle section is where the workout is actually decided: six hundred reps is a volume most people have never attempted in a single session, and doing it in the written order — all the pull-ups, then all the push-ups, then all the squats — is a mistake almost everyone makes exactly once.
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How to partition it
Partition it instead. The standard approach is twenty rounds of five pull-ups, ten push-ups and fifteen air squats, which spreads the load across three movement patterns so no single one fails you. Some athletes prefer smaller, more frequent sets — five rounds of twenty, forty and sixty, broken however they like. Either beats going to failure on pull-ups in the first ten minutes.
What's a good Murph time
Push-ups, not pull-ups, are what break most people. Two hundred is a lot of triceps volume and the reps get slower and uglier long before you reach a hundred. Start smaller than you think you need to. Under forty-five minutes with a vest is a strong result, under an hour is respectable, and finishing at all — vested or not — is the point. Expect to be sore for several days; this is not a workout to attempt untrained.