The BeWOW Breakdown: A Five-Star, Fast-Paced Workout
This Week’s Workout: Jump Rope Your Way to Ripped Muscles
The Breakdown
Total time commitment: 45 minutes
Soreness Factor: Not as bad as we expected, but we’re feeling it in our chest and triceps
Overall Grade (out of five): 5
First Impressions:
If you’ve been following our reviews for any time at all, you may have noted that we tend to be wrong about our first impressions – either we think the workout is going to be awful and it turns out to be kind of easy or vice versa. Well, either we’re getting better at this or we just guessed right for once because we all thought this was going to be a tough, long workout and it was definitely that.
How we felt afterwards:
Things started off nice and reasonable, as you would guess with five burpees and some jump roping. By the third set or so, it became clear as day that not only was it getting harder with the added exercises, but there was NO break. In fact, this is a really well designed workout because of just that. The fitness goal (which we ourselves failed to achieve) is to cruise through these high-intensity sets and then actually be able to recover by jumping rope, lowering your heart rate some and catching your breath. We mere mortals found this to be a bit challenging and by the time we were rounding out our seventh set, we were really feeling the cardio burn. Overall, we thought the workout was challenging, but it was also fast-paced and it really flew by. It was also easy to get through the exercises with the equipment you would find in any given gym (plus a jump rope). We highly recommend trying this one out.
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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