The BeWOW Breakdown: The Easiest BeWOW Workout Yet?
This Week’s Workout: The Cardio Challenge
The Breakdown
Length of Workout: 30 minutes
Difficulty (out of five): 2 (easiest one yet, but we’ll get to that)
Soreness Factor (out of five): 3 (our noodle arms were sore from push-ups)
Overall Grade (out of five): 3
First impressions:
Not going to lie, at first glance this looked like it was going to be a cake-walk, especially compared to some of the more recent workouts. Alon has some weird foot pain so he’s not running. That meant he was really going to be missing out on a big chunk of this workout. Rebecca and Emma would be able to do the full thing and report back.
How we felts afterwards:
So how’d it go? Well turns out this was a super-fast and relatively easy workout. We decided to do this on the Penn track, instead of the gym so we could run outside. Alon raced to the start of the workout by bike to make up for not running (not comparable at all for the record, but it’s something) and met Rebecca and Emma at the track to jump right into the first set of 10 reps. The key to this workout really is speed. Since we were not using weights and the number of reps was low, we figured we’d move fast between exercises to keep our heart rates up and make this as much about the cardio as it was about working specific muscle groups. When we got to the lunge rows we realized that doing them without any weight (note: if you were to run your mile as an out-and-back to a spot with weights; you should use them) was a little silly so we grabbed our work bags and used them as low-weight dumbbells.
In the end, our first impressions panned out: The workout was quick and fairly easy. We ended up cruising through the workout including both runs in around 30 minutes. This workout isn’t going to be your heavy lifting cross-training day, but this could be a great way to shake things up on your easy run day — get a mile in, go through a set of exercises, and run that last mile back.
»» 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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