The BeWOW Breakdown: “Our Muscles Are Still Shaking”
This Week’s Workout: The Muscle-Burning Mountain-Climber Workout
The Breakdown
Total time commitment: 40-45 minutes
Difficulty (out of five): 4
Soreness factor: In Alon’s words, “My immediate feedback is that my shoulders and hips are annihilated.”
Overall grade (out of 5): 4
First impressions:
This workout didn’t seem too tough. We figured each round wouldn’t take too much time and who doesn’t like visualizing climbing up and down a mountain? We weren’t exactly pumped to see pull-ups on the docket again, but you only get stronger by working on your weakest parts.
How we felt afterwards:
Well, we were dead by the end. We started with such zeal, but these moves put together really got the best of us. Rebecca particularly struggled with the sprinters to mountain climbers to squats with an overhead press. Lots of exercises hit the same areas (core, shoulders, hip flexors), so we were wiped by the end. This is a workout we’re still shaking from, but will come back to when we’re looking to get out butts handed to us (oh, and get stronger, of course).
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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