The BeWOW Breakdown: Doing 1 Minute of Push-Ups Is Harder Than You Think
This Week’s Workout: The 1-Minute Challenge
The Breakdown
Total time commitment: 30-35 minutes
Difficulty (out of five): 4
Soreness Factor: We took it easy and avoided being too sore.
Overall Grade (out of five): 4
First Impressions:
We all had the same impression of this workout when we got to the gym on Monday morning: this is going to suck. The thing is that, while Audrey joked that you can do anything for a minute, we weren’t feeling so sure. We’re a bunch of runners who still have noodle arms despite our regular strength training, so a minute of push-ups is a dodgy proposition. On the plus side, we figured at a minute per exercise, the workout would fly by.
How we felt afterwards:
We were right and the workout felt super quick. We were also right that push-ups are tough to keep up for a minute, especially by the third set. Some of us (Alon) just decided to go easy and focus on form instead of speed. That meant lower reps per set and less of a cardio workout. But that definitely didn’t make the workout easy, only more manageable. We found the workout to be fun overall and it had basic enough moves and minimal equipment so you can easily get it done anywhere, which is a nice bonus. If you’re craving a variety of exercises jammed into a quick workout, you’ll love this
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 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
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