The BeWOW Breakdown: Doing 7 Minutes of Wall Squats Isn’t As Scary As It Sounds
This Week’s Workout: The 7-Minute Wall-Squat Challenge
The Breakdown:
Total time commitment: 35 minutes
Difficulty (out of five): 3
Soreness factor: Our shoulders started getting sore during the workout, but not so sore that we won’t be able to raise donuts to our faces … so it’s all good.
Overall grade (out of 5): 5. Audrey is a magician who made seven minutes of wall sits fly by while tricking us into thinking a shoulder and arm workout was a leg workout.
First impressions:
Alon, in typical fashion, started sandbagging as soon as he read the workout on Sunday night. Let’s face it: Seven minutes of wall sits doesn’t sound like a reasonable thing to do. The five circuits didn’t look like they’d be a walk in the park either. Meanwhile Rebecca got her long run done way too late and barely ate afterwards so we all started the workout expecting to have to throw in the towel halfway through.
How we felt afterwards:
We grabbed two sets of weights — lighter ones for the lateral raises and some of the wall-sit variations and heavier for shoulder presses and lunge — and got to work. After the first wall sit, we realized that this workout might actually be possible. A minute on the wall with some conversation to keep you distracted really isn’t that tough. Audrey clearly understood that and added a bunch of variety to the other wall sits so we didn’t even have time to think about our burning quads.
Unfortunately, we did have lots of time to realize that our shoulders and arms were really starting to feel it as we went through the circuits. The great thing about this workout is that you choose the weights (well, except for the push-ups and dips — you’re on your own there), meaning you can make it easier or harder based on your ability level.
All in all, we were happy to finish that last wall sit, but we weren’t too beat in the end. This is a great workout for getting back into the week.
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.
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