Ten down to one sounds like a warm-up until you add it up.
A ladder is a sequence of rounds where the rep count changes by a fixed step each time. Ten, nine, eight, all the way to one. Or twenty, fifteen, twelve, ten. The movement stays the same and usually the load does too. Only the rep count moves.
Most ladders descend, and that direction is deliberate. The rounds get shorter exactly as fatigue arrives, so the difficulty stays roughly flat instead of spiking at the end. An ascending ladder does the opposite and stacks the hardest round onto the most tired version of you, which is a legitimate choice but a much harsher one.
The first thing to do with any ladder is add it up, because the total is always bigger than the shape suggests. Ten down to one is fifty-five reps. Two movements at ten down to one is a hundred and ten. Twenty down to one, which reads like a slightly longer version, is two hundred and ten. The steps hide the volume.
The pacing rule follows from the arithmetic. The big rounds at the start hold most of the total, so what happens in the first three rounds decides the whole session. Going to failure on the set of ten costs you the sets of nine, eight and seven, and you'll pay it back with interest across a dozen small broken sets at the end. Our own burpee and pull-up ladder says it directly: break the pull-ups early, and don't hit failure in the big sets because you'll pay for it later.
Descending ladders create a psychological effect worth naming, because it's the reason people like them. Every round is easier than the last one on paper, so there's always a smaller number ahead. That keeps people moving through a volume they'd have refused if you'd written it as five sets of eleven.
Load stays fixed in a ladder, which is what separates it from a pyramid. Reps step, weight doesn't. If the weight is also moving, you're running something else.
Our burpee and pull-up ladder is ten down to one of both movements, for time. Round one is ten burpees and ten pull-ups. Round two is nine and nine. The last round is one and one. That's fifty-five burpees and fifty-five pull-ups, a hundred and ten reps in total, and the honest completion time for most people is somewhere between eleven and sixteen minutes. Rounds one to four contain thirty-four reps of each movement, which is sixty-two percent of the whole session. That's where it's won or lost. The version that goes wrong is doing the set of ten pull-ups unbroken because you can, then discovering that nine has to be six plus three, eight has to be four plus two plus two, and seven has become a nightmare. The version that works is breaking ten into six and four from the start, taking the small hit early, and arriving at round five still able to do unbroken sets. The seed note for this protocol is two sentences long and both of them are about this exact decision.
10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 reps: burpees + pull-ups. For time.
The app reads the rep scheme out of the prescription and shows you the count due for the round you're actually in, so you're not tracking the descent in your head while breathing hard. The rounds are labelled steps rather than rounds, and the joined scheme is displayed up front, which announces the shape of the session before you start it rather than letting each round surprise you.
Work is paced by you, since a step takes as long as it takes. You tap when the step is done and the split is recorded. If the prescription carries a rest between steps it counts down and rolls into the next one, and if it doesn't, the next step starts immediately.
One honest limitation, because it affects what you can write into a plan. Our classifier recognises a ladder from the word itself or from a run of four or more stepped numbers. That means ten to one is recognised and a three-number scheme like twenty-one, fifteen, nine is not, and a prescription written that way is held for review rather than being guessed into the wrong structure. Writing the word ladder into the description is the reliable fix.
A sequence of rounds where the rep count changes by a fixed step each round while the movement and the load stay the same. Ten down to one is the classic form. The direction matters: descending ladders shrink the rounds as fatigue arrives, keeping the difficulty roughly flat, while ascending ladders stack the hardest round onto the most tired version of you.
Fifty-five per movement, so a two-movement ladder is 110 reps. Twenty down to one is 210 per movement. The stepped presentation consistently makes ladders look lighter than they are, which is why the first thing to do with any ladder is add it up before deciding whether to run it.
Break the big sets early, on purpose, before you have to. The first three or four rounds hold most of the total volume, so going to failure there costs you every round afterwards. Deliberately splitting a set of ten into six and four is almost always faster over the whole session than one unbroken ten followed by a collapse.
Down, unless you have a specific reason. A descending ladder shortens the rounds exactly as fatigue arrives, so the difficulty stays roughly flat from first round to last. An ascending ladder stacks the biggest round onto the most tired version of you. That is a legitimate choice if the point is to finish under duress, but it is a harsher session than the same reps written the other way round, and most people who write one ascending did not mean to.
Build a plan and Fire Your Coach will schedule it, hold the prescription on the screen while you work, and record what actually happened, so next time the numbers start from what you really did.