RESILIENCE
PROTOCOL
A 12-week rebuild for athletes who need their back to perform — not just stop hurting. McGill-based. Performance-targeted. Built by a 16-year Army Infantry veteran who went through the full cycle: the accumulation, the breakdown, and the rebuild.
DIGITAL ACCESS · IMMEDIATE DELIVERY · ALL 42 SESSIONS WRITTEN OUT
Not Designed to
Manage Pain.
When sixteen years of Infantry service ended, Jacques kept doing what he knew: training hard. No real recovery accounting. No acknowledgment of what that career had accumulated in his body. The same output expectation applied to a system running at a chronic deficit.
That approach has a predictable outcome. Lower back. Hip. The breakdown that follows is not a failure of toughness — it is a physiological debt that finally came due.
The rebuild from that produced this program. Not a protocol designed to reduce pain and send you back to the couch. A program designed to take athletes from wherever they are — acute, chronic, post-PT — back to rucking, rolling, lifting, and competing at full capacity. Every phase was lived before it was written.
Built for Athletes.
This is not a rehabilitation program for general back pain patients. It is built for people who have physical performance demands — and need their back to meet them.
Three Principles.
The program is built on the McGill research and fifteen years of applied experience with tactical and combat athletes. These three principles drive every phase decision.
Controlled, appropriate loading is therapeutic — not dangerous. The program uses movement to heal, not avoidance. Rest alone does not rebuild capacity.
The McGill Big 3 — Curl-Up, Side Plank, Bird Dog — train the spine to resist force in all three planes. These are not warm-up exercises. They are the infrastructure the entire program is built on.
Carefully progressed mechanical load repairs tissue and restores capacity. Every phase increases demand incrementally. The exits are performance-based, not calendar-based — you advance when your body is ready, not when the date says so.
Six Myths.
Four Phases.
Each phase has performance-based exit criteria. You advance when your body demonstrates readiness — not when the calendar says three weeks are up. Running a phase an extra week is not failure. It is program compliance.
90/90 breathing, McGill Big 3, BW hip hinge, carries. Eliminate pain triggers. Build intra-abdominal pressure. Establish the movement patterns everything else runs on.
Add loaded carries, rucking, Pallof press, split squats, KB deadlift progression. Build anti-rotation and anti-lateral flexion strength under real load. First ruck session at Week 4.
Barbell deadlift, front squat, pull-ups, heavy farmer carry, KB swings. Ruck loads increase. Target 1.0×BW deadlift. Volume and intensity climb together.
Structured return to sport across all 5 pathways. Peak strength work. AMRAP conditioning blocks. Performance assessment at Week 12. Maintenance protocol handoff.
What You Own
at Week 12.
THE
REBUILD.
Twelve weeks of structured work. Every session written out. Built on the methodology that was lived — not studied from a textbook.
Phase 1 requires resistance bands and kettlebells (12–24 kg range). Phase 3+ requires a barbell. A sled is strongly recommended.
The program includes a full OCA Audit and What's Next routing block once the 12 weeks are complete.