The BeWOW Breakdown: “This Was a Tough Workout, But We Felt Badass at the End”


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Look at those one-legged burpees!

This Week’s Workout: Not Your Average Burpee Workout


The Breakdown

Total time commitment: 40-45 minutes
Difficulty (out of five): 4
Soreness factor: Burpees may do the body good, but they also inflict pain.
Overall grade (out of 5): 4. This was a tough workout, but we felt badass at the end.

First impressions: 

When we got the email with the workout, Rebecca actually laughed out loud. Alon nearly always gripes when burpees are part of the workout and this workout was all about burpees. Rebecca happens to be a masochist and loves the exercise. We also had commented that the last few weeks of workouts were lacking any sort of jumping, so Audrey must have bugged our gym and created this doozy to show us up. 

How we felt afterwards: 

One-legged burpee?! You’ve got to be kidding. The workout didn’t seem that tough to start, but as the burpee variations got crazier and the reps increased, we found ourselves out of breath and dripping in sweat. The one-legged burpee is really a special kind of torture. Audrey humbled us for sure, but it was a really great workout that hit all the major body parts with some cardio intervals to boot. 

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.