The BeWOW Breakdown: Working Out With a Physioball Is REALLY Hard

Our workout testers take our Be Well Workout of the Week — a.k.a. the BeWOW — for a test drive.

alon-climbers3

This is Alon getting crazy with mountain climbers.

This Week’s Workout: Get Ripped with a Physioball

Testing date: Monday, November 2nd. See the workout here.

The Breakdown
Total time commitment: 30 to 35 minutes.
Difficulty: 2 or 3 (out of five). It depends on your balancing ability.
Soreness factor: We’ll probably have some sore shoulders, pecs and abs tomorrow.
Overall grade: 3 (out of 5). This workout felt like it was missing that something special. It was still fun and different, and we would recommend it, especially if you don’t mind looking slightly funny attempting the balancing moves.

First Impression: The Be Well Philly crew sent over this week’s workout somewhere around hour 10 of Alon’s Netflix binge following Saturday’s half marathon. So, of course, Alon took one look, saw eight exercises and up to 30 reps, and groaned into his beer bottle. This workout had a number of exercises he wasn’t very familiar with (What the heck is a pullover? Isn’t that a shirt?), which added to his apprehension.

Rebecca had just done an exercise ball-focused workout last week, but she was pleasantly surprised to see a bunch of exercises that she hadn’t seen before. Mountain climbers on the ball? As mentioned in last week’s Breakdown, Rebecca is hella clumsy and this scared the heck out of her.

Afterwards: This workout sure has some variety and the order of the exercises gives your shoulders and chest a break between the chest fly, pullovers, and reverse fly, which really felt like the hardest part. It didn’t feel that bad while we were doing it, but we know we’ll be feeling those four sets of 30 crunches. And let’s not forget balancing on a ball with one leg while doing lunges and mountain climbers with hands on the ball! That last one was just nuts but makes you feel like a superhero when you don’t fall on your face.

It didn’t take nearly as long as we thought it would (Rebecca was admittedly scared seeing the workout), and we were surprised when it was over so quickly. Some of us were able to do the mountain climbers with the ball away from the wall *cough Alon cough* and some of us were far too clumsy and lacking in core strength for that *cough Rebecca cough.* Overall, it was a good workout, but we may avoid the ball for a week or so from some balancing PTSD.

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 16x marathoner and 14x 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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