The BeWOW Breakdown: “We Guarantee You’ll Leave the Gym Sore and A Lot Stronger”
Workout testers Alon and Emma doing hamstring curls.
This Week’s Workout: The Triple-Attack Workout
The Breakdown
Total time commitment: 60 minutes
Difficulty (out of five): 5
Soreness Factor: So. Many. Squats.
Overall Grade (out of five): 5
First Impressions:
It really doesn’t take too much skill to pick out that this was going to be a long and pretty tough workout. We hadn’t done one of these superset workouts in quite a while so we were excited to mix it up. Still, we went into this one knowing we would get trashed. As a runner, going through with a workout even when you know it’s going to kick your butt adds a mental workout to the physical one. We keep these “No, we got this” small wins in our back pockets for that moment in a race when doubt starts to creep up.
How We Felt Afterwards:
We tend to do the BeWOW workouts on the 3rd or 4th floor of the Penn gym. We can usually tell how rough the workout was by how difficult it is to walk back down the stairs afterwards (unless Audrey mixes it up and makes it all arms, of course — then we gauge it by how much we fail at basic functions like typing). After this workout, we needed to hold onto the handrail so we didn’t tumble down three flights of stairs, but our arms and shoulders were so sore that even that holding on was a challenge. Yeah, it was a tough workout. The fun thing about this workout is that you could probably do most of the moves with no weights and still end up sore afterwards. The sheer number of reps and the combinations of workouts are designed to really push your muscles to the limit. We guarantee you’ll be leaving the gym sore and a lot stronger after this one.
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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