People always ask me if this lift carries over to that lift, or if that lift carries over this other lift —  and maybe it does and maybe it doesn't —  but either way it doesn't really matter anyway.

Unless you are training to compete in powerlifting or in Olympic weightlifting, where very specific variations of very specific lifts are the end all be all (and the only thing that matters), then whether one movement directly carries over into another movement is a concern that misses the forest for the trees.

Much more important than direct carryover (that is, concerning yourself with whether one specific variation positively impacts another specific variation), is the concept of global carryover: 

Does the totality of everything that you are doing in your training come together collectively to make you better all around?

A good way to test this is to get a baseline on some sort of helpful physical metric. For this people often use things like the vertical jump or the 40-yard dash or the broad jump. I'm not saying those are the best things, but they are simple metrics that people often use to test as a proxy for whether or not somebody possesses certain physical qualities. Presumably, if you take a baseline reading, do a bunch of training, and then take another reading later on and they improved then the physical qualities that they represent by proxy have also improved.

The water starts to get a little bit muddy though once people start studying for the test. For example, it's not super helpful to use a metric like the broad jump to test as a proxy for hip extension explosiveness, and then the person starts doing broad jumps all the time... and then obviously their broad jump gets better.

Sure, they got better at taking the test, but they didn't necessarily improve the global skill set that this physical quality represents because they were overly fixated on improving the metric itself.

So I did something a little bit different. Back in 2019 I found a really sweet set of stairs in downtown San Diego, I believe it's called the Grand stairway. The first time I was visiting the city and I saw those stairs... I knew I had to run them! So that's what I did, and I thought I ran pretty well.

Then I came back to San Diego to visit again last year at the end of 2024, and you knew damn well I was going to run those stairs again! And here was the result of that. I actually put my FreeLap timer up this time (I didn't own it back in 2019) — one cone at the bottom of the stairs and one cone at the top — just for fun. For me it's very motivating to have a time after each rep, and having a number to try to beat each time that I run really helps me to push my sets to maximal effort.

And overall I pushed these sets pretty good. I turned in a heck of a workout actually! Looking at my log I did...

• a bunch of bounding up the stairs with one leg

• a bunch of bounding up the stairs with two legs

• then I ran 10 short sprints up 30 stairs

• then I ran 5 sprints up 70 stairs

• then I did another 5 reps up all 100 stairs

• and I finished off with some box jumps onto a wall that's at the top of the stairwell

So that's one heck of a workout! And in 2024 I beat my ghost from 2019 by a pretty good margin as well, as you can see in the short video linked above.

What I'm really getting at here is I don't run stairs! I don't have access to stairs where I live. I don't even really have access to hills. I do a lot of sprinting, and I do a lot of overall strength and conditioning training, but I can't train for this test by studying for this test as I simply don't have the means to do so.

Yet in the last 5 years the metric improved anyway. That's what I mean by global carryover. The totality of what I have been doing has made me better in this essentially random metric that I decided to test. You could test a bunch of other metrics as well and they also most likely will have improved simply due to the global carryover effect from the totality of the training program.

Again, it's not even really about the tests themselves. It's about the physical capacities and qualities that doing well on the tests represents. The goal is not to get better at taking a test. The goal is to improve the physical qualities that your body possesses such that the outputs that it can demonstrate are more potent.

So I just thought this was pretty cool and I think it's an important message for people to try to learn. It's not about direct carryover, and it's not about doing well on specific metrics. It's about global carryover and it's about improving general and overall output, and how chasing that concept makes you a more formidable, healthy, and fit human being.