25 pull-ups, 50 deadlifts, 50 push-ups, 50 box jumps, 50 floor wipers, 50 kettlebell clean-and-presses, 25 pull-ups. Mark Twight built it as a one-off test for the cast of 300. We ran the prep week through a per-muscle recovery model, and the test day through the same math.
Advanced4 days/week6 to 8 weeksNeeds: Pull-up Bar, Barbell, Plyo Box, Kettlebells, DumbbellsUpdated Jul 2026
Almost every workout on this shelf is a translation exercise: someone reads a comic, watches an anime, and reverse-engineers a program that never existed. The 300 workout is the exception. It is real, it is documented, and it was built by a named coach for a named group of people.
In 2006 Warner Bros. hired Mark Twight, a former world-class alpinist who ran a windowless Salt Lake City gym called Gym Jones (no mirrors, no televisions, no comfortable place to sit), to get Zack Snyder’s cast and stunt team looking like Spartans. The training that did the actual work was months of ordinary hard lifting and conditioning on brutal calorie budgets. Vincent Regan trained three to four hours a day on around 1,700 calories, dropped 18 kg in eight weeks, and took his deadlift from 92 kg to 161 kg in the process.
The circuit everybody knows came at the end. Snyder and Twight wanted a graduation exercise, a rite of passage for the cast and stunt team who had earned it: 300 repetitions, for time, in a fixed order, with no moving on until each movement was finished. 25 pull-ups, 50 deadlifts at 135 lb, 50 push-ups, 50 box jumps on a 24 in box, 50 floor wipers at 135 lb, 50 kettlebell clean-and-presses with a 36 lb bell at 25 per arm, and then 25 more pull-ups. The best of the cast went under 18 minutes.
Then a magazine printed it as how the Spartans got in shape, and the internet did what the internet does. Twight has been blunt about the result: he did his job, it became a big thing, and he says he despises it for what it turned into online. People started running a maximal benchmark five or six days a week and wondering why their elbows hurt. That distinction, test versus program, is the entire reality check.
The program
Day 1
Build: half the pull, half the hinge, half the jumps
At test weight, 135 lb or 60 kg, or whatever your scaled bar is. Reset every rep; the test is 50 of these and rounding the back at rep 38 is how people get hurt.
25 total, chest to floor, hips in line. The test's 50 come after 50 deadlifts, so quality now beats quantity now.
Floor wipers
4 × 6 with a light loaded bar
Lie under a bar held at lockout, sweep straight legs from plate to plate. Start at 60 to 95 lb even if the test bar will be 135; the shoulders are the thing that fails first.
The test is 20-plus minutes at a heart rate you cannot argue with. Gym Jones' own replacement benchmark, 300 calories on an Airdyne in under 10 minutes, exists because this quality is the real limiter.
Closing 25. This is the part the test is actually about.
Day 6
Rest
Rest. This is where the adaptation actually happens.
Day 7
Rest
Rest. This is where the adaptation actually happens.
What it actually trains
Computed from the program above with the app’s involvement math, not asserted: brighter muscle, more weekly volume.
Hover a highlighted muscle
Most volumeModerateLight
Glutes
20 · in the growth band
Upper Back
16 · in the growth band
Chest
12 · in the growth band
Abs
12 · in the growth band
Forearms
11 · in the growth band
Lower Back
10 · in the growth band
Traps
10 · maintenance
Quads
8 · maintenance
Biceps
8 · maintenance
Calves
8 · maintenance
Hamstrings
7 · maintenance
Triceps
5 · maintenance
Obliques
5 · maintenance
Shoulders
4 · maintenance
Involvement-weighted sets per week, the same accounting the Helix app uses. The pale band marks 10–20 weighted sets, the range where extra volume reliably keeps paying back. Timed work (runs, holds) is counted as a few set-equivalents, an approximation.
Untrained by this program
AdductorsTibialis
Audit clean
Every muscle this program loads gets its full recovery window before it is loaded again. That is rarer than it should be.
The reality check
The prep week returns zero recovery flags, and that is not the program being easy. Three build days, one test, three full rest days. The engine finds no muscle trained again inside its window anywhere in the week, because every hard day is followed by 48 hours or more and the test is bracketed by rest on both sides. Weekly volume comes out balanced too: glutes lead at 19.9 weighted sets, then upper back 15.6, chest 12.4, abs 12.3, forearms 11.3, and nothing is starved. That balance is a consequence of the rest days, not a substitute for them. Delete Day 4 and the clean audit dies immediately.
The test day spikes everything at once, and that is what makes it a test. Day 5 alone registers a meaningful hit on fourteen separate muscle groups: 11 weighted sets on the glutes, 8 on the upper back, 6.2 on the chest, 4.5 on biceps and traps, plus abs, quads, hamstrings, lower back, forearms, calves, triceps, obliques and delts. In a normal program that single day would be a red flag. Here it is the product. A test day borrows recovery from the days around it; the borrowing is the whole design, which is exactly why there are three rest days and why you run this thing rarely.
The failure mode is doing it as a routine. Run those fourteen muscle groups at that intensity on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and the audit stops returning zero and starts returning something closer to the Saitama numbers. Fifty reps of anything for time destroys technique in the last third, and the specific casualties are predictable: the elbow tendon on 100 total pull-ups, the lower back on 50 fast deadlifts, and the shoulders on 50 floor wipers holding a loaded bar overhead while fatigued. Twight built a one-off. The internet built a habit out of it and then wrote the tendinitis posts.
What it actually measures. Not maximal strength. 135 lb is a light deadlift and a 16 kg bell is a light press; the test asks whether you can keep producing sub-maximal force for twenty-odd minutes while your heart rate sits near its ceiling and your grip quietly leaves. That is work capacity, and it is why the closing 25 pull-ups are the real exam. Everything before them is setup.
How to run it
Prerequisites, honestly. You want strict pull-ups in the bank (not 25 unbroken, but enough that 25 broken into sets is not a grind you fail at rep 14), and you want a deadlift you can repeat 50 times without your back rounding. Gym Jones’ own standard for adequacy was a 2× bodyweight deadlift and 25 consecutive pull-ups, which is a higher bar than the test itself. If you do not know your numbers, work them out with the one-rep-max calculator before you touch a loaded bar for reps.
Scaling the weights, which is not cheating. Keep 135 lb only if it is under roughly 35 percent of your deadlift one-rep max; otherwise scale it there. Floor wipers scale hardest: start at 60 to 95 lb regardless of your bench, because the limiter is holding a bar at lockout with tired shoulders, not the abs. The box can drop to 20 in, and the bell to 12 kg. Band-assisted pull-ups are a fine substitute; kipping to inflate the count is not, because the closing 25 is the measurement.
The pass standard. The best of the 300 cast went under 18 minutes. Under 25 minutes is a genuinely good effort for a well-trained amateur, 25 to 35 minutes is a normal first attempt, and past 40 minutes it stops being a test of work capacity and becomes a long day with a barbell. If you are heading that way, stop, scale the loads, and come back in six weeks.
How often to test: rarely. Once at the start of a 6 to 8 week block and once at the end, then leave it alone for a couple of months. The week above is the shape of the final week, with the test in it; the five or six weeks before it should be ordinary strength training with the four movements built up gradually, and the test day replaced by a third build day. Anyone running the 300 more than roughly once a month has confused the exam with the syllabus.
A 300-repetition circuit done for time in a fixed order, with each movement finished before the next begins: 25 pull-ups, 50 deadlifts at 135 lb, 50 push-ups, 50 box jumps on a 24 in box, 50 floor wipers at 135 lb, 50 kettlebell clean-and-presses with a 36 lb bell (25 per arm) and a final 25 pull-ups. Mark Twight created it at Gym Jones as a graduation test for the cast and stunt team of the film 300.
Is the 300 workout real, or made up for the movie?+
It is real, which makes it unusual among fiction-inspired workouts. Warner Bros. hired Mark Twight of Gym Jones in 2006 to train the cast, and the circuit was built as a one-off rite of passage at the end of months of ordinary strength and conditioning work. It was never the training that produced the physiques on screen; it was the test at the end of it.
Can you do the 300 workout every day?+
No, and this is the single most common mistake with it. Our analysis shows the test day alone landing meaningful load on fourteen muscle groups at once, including 11 weighted sets on the glutes and 8 on the upper back. Repeated two or three times a week that is a reliable route to elbow tendinitis and a cranky lower back. Twight himself has said he dislikes what the workout became online for exactly this reason. Test it once every one to two months at most.
What is a good 300 workout time?+
The best of the 300 cast finished in under 18 minutes. For a well-trained amateur, under 25 minutes is a strong result, 25 to 35 minutes is a realistic first attempt, and beyond 40 minutes the loads are too heavy to be testing what the circuit is meant to test. Scale the weights down and retest in six weeks rather than grinding through.
How do you do floor wipers safely?+
Lie on your back holding a loaded barbell at arm's length above your chest, then sweep straight legs up to touch one plate, lower, and repeat to the other side. The shoulders holding the bar fail before the abs do, so start well under the prescribed 135 lb, around 60 to 95 lb, and build hollow-hold strength first. If the bar starts drifting over your face, the set is over.