The BeWOW Breakdown: “This Workout Has a Bit of Everything”
Alon on the jump rope, taking names.
This Week’s Workout: Jump Rope for Joy
Testing date: Monday, December 7th. See the workout here.
The Breakdown
Total time commitment: 35 to 40 minutes
Difficulty (out of five): 4
Soreness factor: Immediate soreness. We were sore while doing it, we’re sore afterwards, and we’ll definitely be sore tomorrow.
Overall grade (out of 5): 4.5. This workout feels like it hits a bit of everything in the arms and legs. The jump rope was a fun way to break up the sets and the build-up from two exercises to eight made for quite the challenge.
Initial impressions: It feels only fair to point out that we both ran the Rocky 50K on Saturday. Rebecca is the race organizer and has done it every year, but this was Alon’s first ultramarathon. Our expectations were not very high for how our legs would hold up for any workout, especially one with eight sets of 20 lunge walks plus lateral lunges and burpees. (Alon just hates burpees.) Overall, the workout looked like it might be challenging, but probably wouldn’t be too crazy.
Afterwards: Going into this workout, all our focus was on our tired legs, so we didn’t really worry too much about all the arm exercises. That was probably a mistake. By the time we moved through the fifth set having done burpees, push-ups, and shoulder presses, we realized this was going to be a tougher workout than we anticipated. Perhaps our arms and shoulders were more sore from the 50K two days prior than we expected. Whatever it was, we found ourselves dropping down our weights as the sets progressed. Alon and Rebecca were both down to knee-down push-ups by the seventh set. This workout starts off nice and easy and lures you in. Don’t forget that you’ll end up doing five sets of 15 push-ups, four sets of lunges with shoulder presses, three sets of bicep curls, and two sets of lunge rows all before you grab a pull-up bar for 10 (!) pull-ups. Get ready to feel some serious burn and definitely jump (rope) for joy while you’re at it.
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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