The BeWOW Breakdown: This Is a 5-Star 30-Minute Workout
Alon and Rebecca sweating through a minute of wall sits.
This Week’s Workout: Your New Favorite Do-Anywhere 30-Minute Workout
The Breakdown
Total time commitment: 30 minutes of work + 5 minutes transition time
Difficulty (out of five): 3 (though it feels like a 5 at times)
Soreness factor: Expect a nice, low-level soreness all over.
Overall grade (out of five): 5. This is a quick, well-rounded workout. Would recommend to a friend.
Our first impressions:
On the one hand, we’ve got a whole bunch of exercises, but on the other hand it’s only a 30-minute workout. But then, on the other other hand, a minute does seem like an awful lot of time for planks, push-ups, and mountain climbers.
How we felt afterwards:
BeWOW mastermind Audrey put together a really great workout this week. She squeezed so much into this 30-minute package and by working off a clock, you can really adjust the difficulty to match your fitness level. Full disclosure: Alon’s push-ups were deliberately slow, which was a great way to concentrate on form and kill some time. Rebecca took the same approach with the squats.
When we first read through the workout, it really seemed like a bunch of bull that there were both planks and plank shifts, as well as squats and plié squats. But Audrey spaced the exercises so that we felt sufficiently recovered by the time we went from one to the next. And by the end, we felt like we had gotten a good workout without feeling so dead that we were sloppily racing through exercises.
So as you tackle this workout, remember that it’s short. Take your time where you need it and I promise you that the wall sits and planks will be over before you know it.
»» Ready to sweat through this week’s workout? You can find it here.
About our workout 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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