Well, I just got back from a week in Hawaii with my family. It was great! We all had a wonderful time being together in the beautiful state that is Hawaii. One thing I did when I was down there was take advantage of the beautiful setting and have a few workouts on the beach, in front of the endless horizon. Since I was working out with the family I decided to take it a little easy on them. I read in the latest issue of Men’s Health a quick little workout that Dan John wrote. It was very simple:
30 second pushup plank
30 second sprint
30 second Jumping Jacks
30 second sprint
30 second rest
8 total sets
That’s it. Like I said, I was working out with the family so I decided to scale everything back to 15 seconds, do a sprint-plank-sprint-jumping jacks pattern and do only three sets to start.
Now, I don’t do sprints a whole lot in my normal workouts, but when I do, I’ll usually do 20 or 30 second sprints. I’ll do tabatas or something like the workout I just wrote out. A 30 second all-out sprint is no picnic but I can do them, however, I was totally unprepared for beach sprints. I figured with scaling everything back it would be somewhat easy. I was wrong. The combination of the uneven ground and the give of the sand made those 15 seconds seem a heck of a lot longer. I would estimate that those sprints were probably 3 to 4 times harder than sprints on a hard surface.
After those three sets we were all really worked. It was great! It wasn’t only the sprints either. We did some stretching that was very different as the sand would shift under our feet. (Doing lunge stretches really test the balance there). The jumping jacks also required much more effort. I was expecting a nice vacation workout with the family and I got a really cool surprise.
Later on in the week I did this workout:
10 pushups
20 second sprint
15 crunches
20 second sprint
15 squats
20 second sprint
1 minute rest-3 sets
(another Dan John workout)
followed by
15 second jump squat
15 second speed squat (body weight squats as fast as you can)
15 second pause squat (hold at the bottom for 1 second)
15 second hold squat (hold at the bottom for the full 15 seconds)
45 seconds rest-3 sets
(an Alwyn Cosgrove workout, also from Men’s Health)
It was a good one. The whole thing only took about 20 minutes and I felt absolutely finished when I was done
Anyway, it was a really eye-opening experience that I wanted to share with you and it shows once again that pretty much wherever you are or how much time you have, you can get a nice workout in. It also shows you that when are somewhere like Hawaii, get the heck out of the stuffy gym and take advantage of your surroundings! You can bench at your home gym all year long! You’ll never know what you might discover.
Apollo knew a secret!
Mitchell Rothbardt
www.mitchrothbardttraining.com
(coming soon)
P.S. Thanks for voting in the latest poll. It was unanimous! The Philadelphia Phillies will be the 2008 National League Eastern Division champions! We are all very excited.
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