What is the Armor Building Complex?

Dan John’s complex: 2 cleans, 1 press, 3 front squats with double bells, no setting down.

How many rounds of ABC should I do?

Start with 5 rounds on the minute. The complex is short; the density is the difficulty.

What weight for the ABC?

Two bells you can strictly press five times. Most start lighter than they expect.

complex · fitness / sequence

Armor Building Complex (ABC)

sequence 3 atomas distilled today

One round is 2 cleans, 1 press, 3 front squats, performed without putting the bells down. Dan John built it for exactly that reason.

Double kettlebell clean

Double clean, 2 reps. This atoma does not exist yet.
Press a kettlebell overhead atoma

Double press, 1 rep. Strict, no leg drive.
Goblet squat with perfect depth atoma

Front squat, 3 reps. Racked, not goblet, when using two bells.

0 of 3 done

Double kettlebell clean
Press a kettlebell overhead
Goblet squat with perfect depth

1Founder draft core@bernard · in a complex the order is what gets voted

#1 becomes the Core. In a complex the ORDER is what gets voted.

Gear lives on the member atomas. This complex needs: two kettlebells.

ABC Complex · founder draft

@bernard · challengers welcome

fanouts · the community votes where this atom ends

people ask · parameters live here, knowledge links out

Dan John’s complex: 2 cleans, 1 press, 3 front squats with double bells, no setting down.
Start with 5 rounds on the minute. The complex is short; the density is the difficulty.
Two bells you can strictly press five times. Most start lighter than they expect.

atomas in this complex

Press a kettlebell overhead Goblet squat with perfect depth

also asked as

armor building complex · kettlebell abc · abc kettlebell complex · abc kettlebell program · dan john abc one complex, one home

the concept

Why the web needs atoma

01 · The problem

Someone wants to do something: swing a kettlebell, cook bone broth, start investing, and wants the result, not the research project. Today they get the research project:

Noise over density. For every insightful answer, fifty padded or wrong ones. SEO rewards length; the reader wants the opposite.
Scatter. The same problem phrased a thousand ways across a thousand URLs, with no single home where the best insight accumulates.
Ephemerality. An answered question dies in the feed. The web has no mechanism for an answer to converge.

Wikipedia solved “what is X.” Nothing has solved “how do I do X.”

02 · The atom

Átomos: that which cannot be cut further. One canonical problem, one permanent URL, holding:

Core: the #1-ranked version: 3, 5 or 7 steps, ≤ 30 words each, democratically agreed. A step may fold out at most 3 sub-steps, one level deep, never more, and the core must stand alone with all of them collapsed. The constraint is the product: density is enforced, not hoped for.
Versions: competing distillations, crowd-voted. The winner becomes the Core.
One best per channel: every atom holds exactly one YouTube video, one TikTok, one Instagram post, one article: the best of each medium, voted like everything else. Channels are open-ended: loop/GIF, image, and podcast are channels too, and an empty channel shows a vacant seat until someone nominates its first champion. Challengers queue behind the champion, and dethroned champions stay attached as history: the atom remembers what used to be best. The best video is chaptered so every step plays its section, embedded from the source.
Fanouts: variants and edge cases. The community votes where this atom ends and a new one begins; atoms start with core elements and split only when a fanout outgrows them.

Every phrasing of a problem is an alias, not a new page: a thousand scattered questions collapse into one atoma. The alias graph is also a search-intent map.

03 · Machine-readable by design

Every atom is published twice: once for humans, once for machines. The page carries schema.org HowTo markup, and every atom is addressable as clean JSON: steps, sources, timestamps, vote counts, license. As AI assistants answer more “how do I” questions, atoma is the verified, citable layer they ground on: and every citation carries its sources with it.

04 · Vs. the field

Google ranks ten padded pages; atoma is the destination, not the directory.
Quora / Reddit scatter and die in the feed; an atom compounds forever.
WikiHow is padded and editorially closed; atoma is crowd-ranked and length-capped.
ChatGPT regenerates an unverified answer each time; atoma is the human-validated best-known-method.

05 · Brand

The mark is a true atom. Three orbits for the three democratic loops: steps, media, fanouts, around one nucleus: the problem. Three electrons run the orbits, each drawing its trail: the media in motion. The amber one is the current champion.

the atom ✓

nucleus-a

convergence

06 · The democracy

The democratic element is the product. Atoma borrows what works from Reddit and fixes what does not:

Up/down votes on versions, media champions, and fanout boundaries: one mechanic everywhere.
Credibility per topic, not global karma: win votes in fitness/technique, earn ⚡ technique. A cooking expert’s vote counts more in cooking, slightly: weighted, never gated.
Convergence, not feeds. Reddit’s votes rank an endless stream; atoma’s votes converge each atom toward one best answer. Winning writes history, not karma alone.

07 · The superlative template

Every atom carries the same snippet formula. The superlative is earned, not claimed: votes make “best” a measurable statement, so the snippet survives a second read:

Title (≤60): {Problem}: Best Way in {N} Steps ({votes} Votes)
Description (≤155): The best way to {problem}: {aliases} questions condensed into {N} voted steps. Plus the #1 video, article & loop. Community-verified, no scrolling.
Headings: one H1 = the canonical problem; every step an H2, verb first.
Schema: HowTo + VideoObject with per-step Clip timestamps + breadcrumbs: steps, chapters and the “best” claim are machine-checkable.

08 · MVP

One vertical (fitness technique), ~100 LLM-drafted and founder-verified atoms, alias search, voting, submit-a-version with the format constraint enforced. Success signal: the day a stranger’s version out-votes the founder’s, the mechanism works.

one-liner Atoma is unifying the web for action: one atom per problem, the most condensed, community-verified way to do anything.

Armor Building Complex (ABC)

Double kettlebell clean + write this atoma

Press a kettlebell overhead atoma

Goblet squat with perfect depth atoma

Double kettlebell clean