The BeWOW Breakdown: “Our Arms Have Been Replaced With Limp Noodles”

If you're looking for a killer arm workout, we think you've found it.

Emma doing pull-ups (with a little assistance).

Emma doing pull-ups (with a little assistance).

This Week’s Workout: Sculpt Your Upper Body in 8 Moves


The Breakdown

Total time commitment: 40 to 45 minutes
Difficulty (out of five): 4
Soreness Factor: Our arms have been replaced with limp noodles.
Overall Grade (out of five): 4

Our first Impressions:

We are always looking for tough workouts and to work on our guns, so this seemed like an exciting one. Alon was not able to make it, so Emma and Rebecca did the workout together, with cautious optimism that the eight moves wouldn’t be too tough.

How we felt afterwards:

Per usual, we were wrong. Doing 10 push-ups doesn’t feel too hard followed by 15 rows, but do that 5 times total and you’ll be shaking. The workout took longer than we thought it would for so few moves, but all of those reps add up. Emma’s strong as heck, so she crushed it, but Rebecca felt like the moves were crushing her. While Emma is capable of doing pull-ups with no assistance, by the end of the workout, both Emma and Rebecca opted for the pull-up machine (side note: Rebecca can’t even daydream of doing a single pull-up without it). Overall, this was a tough workout that’s left us sore, but it was great!

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

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