The BeWOW Breakdown: This Is a Workout You Can Recycle Over and Over Again
This Week’s Workout: Shred Your Arms and Abs with a Stability Ball
The Breakdown
Total time commitment: 45 minutes
Difficulty (out of five): 3
Soreness factor: Sore arms, sore chest. It’s going to be hard to type today.
Overall grade (out of 5): 4
First impressions:
At first glance, this workout looks like a ton of exercises and a ton of reps. This impression held true as we went through the exercises but we quickly fell into the rhythm of moving from arms to core and back again. The physioball always provides a fun challenge and distraction from the pain of dozens of push-ups and crunches and such.
How we felt afterwards:
You think we’d learn to stop being afraid of high rep counts, but we still went in pretty sure our arms would not survive the onslaught. Well, really we had some reason to be worried. The first set of 20 reps was legitimately tough, especially when balancing on the physioball. After all, it’s rough doing 20 push-ups with your feet on the ball. Then you start doing mountain climbers and even reverse flies and the pitiless wrath of the ball really comes to light. The second two sets (15 and 10 reps) felt ridiculously fast compared to that first set, so once we got going, the whole workout flew by and was actually pretty fun. Still, there were a lot of exercises so even moving quickly, this workout took us a bit longer than usual. This is a great arms, chest, and ab workout for the rotation. Just keep upping the weights as the exercises get easier and you can recycle this one for a long time.
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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