The BeWOW Breakdown: You Will Feel the Burn From This 25-Minute Workout

The Breakdown
Length of Workout: 25-30 minutes
Difficulty (out of five): 4
Soreness Factor (out of five): 4
Overall Grade (out of five): 4.5

Out First Impressions:
Our gym’s multi-purpose room has been out of commission for over a month now, which has been a saga. It means that our first impression every week is one of mild anxiety over how the heck we’re actually going to actually be able to do the workout. This week was no exception, but layered on that was the fact that we’d literally be throwing medicine balls at the floor full force. That’s probably not advisable in a room full of people and workout machines. And so we headed to the gym for a brand new adventure.

How We Felt Afterwards:
The great news is that we found a sneaky hidden room in the gym that sometimes gets used for fitness classes but happened to be empty that morning (no joke, Penn’s gym is like Hogwarts, guys). And the room came with mats and medicine balls! Success! We loved that this workout set a timer and let us just work at our own pace. Six minutes was long enough to really get into the exercises (we did at least three sets of everything), but wasn’t so long that we were longing for the alarm to buzz. It was pretty great to do some familiar exercises with the ball, too. Sometimes little changes like that are all you need to liven things up. And let’s not forget that slamming medicine balls on the ground is just plain, cathartic fun.

Audrey points out that you should find a medicine ball that’s not too crazy heavy and that’s good advice. Some of these exercises take a toll on the shoulders. You don’t want to spend the whole workout struggling with a ball that’s too heavy wobbling over your head, so just pull back a bit and focus on execution. We can promise you that you’ll be feeling the burn no matter what.

»» 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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