The BeWOW Breakdown: A Tough But Rewarding 5-Star Workout
This Week’s Workout: The Upper-Body Workout That Sneaks Up on Your Lower Half
The Breakdown
Length of Workout: 50 to 60 minutes
Difficulty (out of five): 5
Soreness Factor (out of five): 5 (shoulders fell off)
Overall Grade (out of five): 5
First Impressions:
Not gonna lie, there were some expletives tossed out when we saw this week’s Be Well Workout of the Week. We suspect that Audrey is on to us and whenever we say a workout isn’t too tough, she follows up with one designed to make us sweat. This definitely looked like it would be that kind of punishing workout and we were excited and a little hesitant to get into it.
How We Felt Afterwards:
Rebecca has been traveling for work and couldn’t make it to the gym so Emma and Alon went it alone. This ended up being a long, but fun workout and an … interesting way to start the week. We don’t often spend five minutes at a time in a squat position, so we were literally feeling the burn right from the start doing the squat to lunge pivot with a punch and row. This combination was brand new to us and it took us a minute to get the hang of it. We recommend taking your time to start to make sure you get the pivot right. Alon kept ending up with his feet aligned in a lunge which put him off balance for the punch and row, but after a few tries he was nailing it. The other exercises were straightforward, but by no means easy. We can practically guarantee that your shoulders will be screaming after four sets of downward dog to a push-up, as just one example — and there are plenty of them in this workout. There’s a lot of twisting, bending and pivoting in this workout. Keep your focus on your form and do these exercises right. It’s a tough but rewarding one.
»» 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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