The BeWOW Breakdown: Hallelujah! There Are No Burpees in This Workout
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This Week’s Workout: The Super-Killer Superset Workout
Testing date: Monday, November 16th. See the workout here.
The Breakdown
Total time commitment: 40 to 50 minutes
Difficulty (out of five): 3ish. Maybe up to a five — some of the exercises are naturally hard, but you can choose the weights to use on others to make this workout easier or harder.
Soreness factor (out of five): 3. This one hurts so good
Overall grade (out of 5): 5. Lots of exercises here, but you get through them quickly and it’s super fun.
Alon’s first impression: This week was always going to be tough. Rebecca had just run a 50 miler (Yes—miler. She’s insane.), so I would be doing the workout on my own, because even she’s not crazy enough to hit the gym at 7 a.m. after that. When I saw the workout, my first thought was, “This trainer is definitely trying to kill us.” There are so many exercises listed in this week’s workout that it was easy to feel intimidated at first glance. But I read it over and realized that each pair of exercises could really be seen as a unit, and it began to look a lot more reasonable. I wasn’t really sure how to deal with the sheer variety of exercises and equipment required, and I can see that being a real challenge for some people: You need a mat, a bunch of free weights, a bench, parallel bars for dips, and a bunch of floor space to hop around doing jump squats and ski jumpers. It’s stuff you’ll find in any gym, but not necessarily in one spot.
Then again, there was that suggestion to go through the whole circuit all over again, and it is my duty to follow the instructions to the letter.
Alon afterwards: I basically decided to make this workout more manageable and chose weights I knew would be tough but wouldn’t totally max me out. Don’t get me wrong: I was working — hard. It’s just that I was still reeling from last week’s BeWOW and I didn’t want to end up in a puddle on the ground again this week. The workout instructions weren’t clear, so I did one rep per arm, leg, or side for each exercise. That meant 12 lunges per leg, 12 bicycle crunches per side, etc. Like I expected, the exercises paired up really well. Doing the super sets made the workout really fun and dynamic, and the short reps meant I was moving through the routine super quick. I did find myself walking back and forth across the gym from weights to mat to bench, but it didn’t really add any time and the walks were a nice break between sets, anyway. Taking my time with everything and keeping the weights reasonable, I still banged out the whole circuit in 20 minutes per round. The best part of the workouy? No burpees.
About our testers:
Rebecca Barber is the founder of the Rocky 50K Fat Ass Run, a just-for-fun 50K run that follows Rocky Balboa’s footsteps in Rocky II. She’s a 16x marathoner and 14x ultra marathoner, having started running when she was a kid. She’s an active volunteer with Back on My Feet Philadelphia, where she works to help the homeless community use running as a means to better their lives and find stable employment and housing. When not running all the miles, she is the social media coordinator for The Wharton School.
Alon Abramson is the founder of the West Philly Runners, the creator of RunPhil.ly – a web resource for running in Philadelphia – and the organizer of a number of running events in Philly, including the annual 26×1 Mile Team Marathon Relay, Beat the Bus, and Beat the Commute. Running since high school, Alon is an on-again, off-again runner with ebbs and flows to his mileage and commitment. More recently however, he’s taken a new approach to training, emphasizing cross-training and speed work as much as building up mileage and this has dramatically improved his running performance. When he’s not organizing and running, Alon works as a research project manager at Penn’s Institute for Urban Research, studying energy efficiency best practices. He’s on a number of non-profit boards and works on his whole-home retrofit project whenever there’s free time.
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