The BeWOW Breakdown: A 5-Star Workout for a Refreshing Change of Pace
This Week’s Workout: 32-Minute Hilly Treadmill Challenge
The Breakdown
Total time commitment: Ideally, 32 minutes. In reality, 45 minutes.
Difficulty (out of five): 4.5. That elevated heart rate makes this workout a beast
Soreness Factor: Amazingly, I don’t think we’ll be too sore after this one.
Overall Grade (out of five): 5. This workout provided a refreshing change of pace.
Our first impressions:
All of us are running a half marathon on Sunday so when we saw that this workout called for 30-second sprints, we started whining. This is probably not the workout we would have chosen to do the week before a race, but we weren’t about to back down. Our other thought was that someone was going to eat it on the treadmill as we hopped on and off, especially after last week’s flops with the kettle bells.
How we felt afterwards:
Workout designer Audrey recommends doing this workout with a partner so you can quickly go between the treadmill and the floor exercises. We thought that we would just ignore that advice since there were three of us. Unfortunately, the gym treadmills time out after a minute of inactivity and so it would take us at least a minute to get our runs started again. We were grateful for the slightly longer breaks, but it definitely changed the intensity of the workout. Those additional rests might also explain why we were only kind of dying and not totally laid-out at the end. Overall, this was really fun to do. If you’re looking for intense strength training, you’ll have to look elsewhere, but if you want to get a boost of cardio with a helping of chest and shoulders, this workout is solid.
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 19x marathoner and 17x 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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