The BeWOW Breakdown: An Adjustable, Quick-Burst Workout

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This Week’s Workout: Muscle-Blasting 30-Minute Partner Workout


The Breakdown
Total time commitment: 45 minutes (it’s only 30 minutes of exercises but we built in some time for transitions and moving around the gym).
Difficulty (out of 5): 4. We would give it a 3, but the sprints were tough.
Soreness Factor: Our shoulders and hamstrings are likely going to feel this for a few days.
Overall Grade (out of 5): 4. This was a little repetitive after the 3rd set or so.

Our First Impressions:
This workout really didn’t seem like it should be too tough. It’s was a bit of a relief to see only a handful of exercises with such short times for each rep. Sure, there would be five sets, but we were feeling confident.

How We Felt Afterwards:
We were pretty dead on in our assessment of this workout. It’s amazing how quickly 30 seconds passes and you really do feel like you can handle anything in a short burst like that. As she often does, BeWOW workout mastermind Audrey lets you make some adjustments to make each of these exercises easier or harder by adjusting your speed or the weights you’re using (the exception being planks, of course). Since we’re all coming off a bit of a slow workout period (Alon was traveling for a week, Emma is fighting through ITBS, and Rebecca is enjoying an easier schedule since completing the Philly Marathon), we opted to go easy with fairly manageable weights and a steady pace.

These exercises all add up to target two major areas: first is the shoulders, which are already feeling sore as we write this up; the other is the back of our legs from dead lifts and sprints. We all wisely did a short warm-up before we jumped into this workout and we can’t recommend doing so enough. A good stretch would help relieve long-term soreness too. Good luck!

»» 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. 

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