Convict Conditioning - Paul Wade

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Some of you may be tempted to just launch into your training by scanning the exercises in
this book, maybe discovering the hardest techniques you can do, or just attempting
whatever catches your eye and looks cool. This is not training. This is playing.
Training requires discipline and focus. It requires the discrimination to know where to start, the
knowledge of what to do, the insight into when to really push, and the wisdom to understand
when to stop. It requires regime.
Living by the Buzzer
Living in prison, you learn all about regime. There's a time for you to eat, a time for you to
sleep, a time for you to socialize, a time for you to get inspected, and a time for you to do your
duties. Everything is done according to the clock, and very little is left to your control. In some
places they called this living by the buzzer, because a buzzer sounds when a certain period of the
day begins or ends.
Living like this-with an enforced timetable-for so many years has taught me to appreciate the
value of time. After a while, the body and mind thrive on a set routine-which is one of the reasons
veteran cons tend to become so institutionalized. If they get out, they miss that timetable.
There's nobody to tell them what to do and when to do it, and they become lost, in a deep, deep
way. The smart ones have the brains to create their own timetables to stick to on the outside. This
helps many survive and stops them going off the rails.
The prison athletes who are most successful are also smart enough to develop timetables. They
don 't just do their calisthenics when they feel like it, or when they're bored or lonely. Far from it.
They look at their prison routine, and purposefully insert training times within that routine.
Doing this gave us a sense of control in a world where we had very little control. It also gave us
something of our own, something we owned to look forwards to. Sometimes-maybe after a hard