The BeWOW Breakdown: This Workout Is Guaranteed to Give You Noodle Arms

And jello legs.
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This Week’s Workout: Beat the Clock and Feel the Burn


The Breakdown
Total time commitment: 40-50 minutes
Difficulty (out of five): 5
Soreness factor: Expect an acute case of jello legs and noodle arms.
Overall grade (out of 5): 5

First impressions: 

After last week’s workout, we were all pretty confident and actually thought this workout would be a breeze. I’m not sure where our mental math went wrong, but we were in for a real surprise as soon as we got moving. Workout designer Audrey did not hold back this week and this turned out to be an aggressive whole-body workout. Even exercises we assumed would be easy, like the ab rocks, turned out to just crush us when we started going through the full workout.

How we felt afterward: 

Once we made it through the first set of exercises, we knew we were in trouble. For once, none of us had just run a big race over the weekend, but we were starting to feel as though we had. It turns out 25 kettlebell swings followed by 15 squats with skiers and burpees sprinkled in is pretty much the equivalent of a 5K race … and we still had three more sets to go! Alon, who has been, let’s say lax, with his training this winter and spring, was completely devastated by the time we were making out way through the third set. Everyone developed a severe case of noodle arms. Push-ups became assisted push-ups on knees, pull-ups went from a confident 5 reps to a pitiful 2 reps by the end. It was ugly. But we slogged through and felt pretty proud of ourselves as we walked out of the gym on jello legs and thought about how sore we would be for the rest of the week — or maybe the rest of our lives.

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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