The BeWOW Breakdown: These Easy Exercises Add Up to a Good Workout 

Finally — an excuse to use the resistance bands you always say you're going to use.

This Week’s Workout: Shred Your Muscles With Just a Resistance Band

The Breakdown
Difficulty (out of five): 3. The exercises were all relatively easy to do, but added up to a good workout.
Soreness Factor (out of five): 3. Resistance bands have the benefit of being lower intensity so you get the burn without as much soreness.
Overall Grade (out of five): 4. This would have been a 5, but it ran a bit long for our liking.

First Impressions:
We are definitely big fans of “do-anywhere” workouts so we were keen on giving this one a whirl. It’s also nice to have an excuse to actually use our bands that we have sitting around and we always say we’re going to use while we’re sitting in front of the TV … but then the couch is just so soft.

How We Felt Afterwards:
Though the exercises were all straightforward, it took us a little while to get into the groove of this workout. But by the time we made our way through the long 25-rep set, we had the routine down and we really breezed through. Coach Audrey suggests using two different resistances for this workout and we thought this was solid advice (even if we didn’t follow it  —we only brought one band each with us). We found some of the exercises to be a bit too easy, while others were just right. If you have the gear and don’t mind taking an extra minute to set up a second band at each height, definitely do it. Lastly, make sure to feel properly badass as you do the twisting rows and know that everyone in the gym (neigh, the neighborhood) is aware of your awesomeness.

»» Ready to sweat through this week’s workout? You can find it here

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 withBack 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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