Fabulous Forty

Quite the butt-kicking crosstraining workout at Rehab United tonight. I've decided to do at least one night of cross training since I've been so cycling specific with my exercise lately. The workout tonight was called the Fabulous 40. It was essentially a circuit work out with some pretty funky exercises.

The stations were

Airplane Push-ups - This requires you to raise one arm up and over your body at the top of each push-up.

Bowler's Squat with dumbbells - Start standing straight up with dumbells in hand, move your right leg back behind and across your body while simultaneously crossing your arm with dumbbell in the same direction but in front of your body.

Box-Steps with weight - One foot on a 2 foot high box the other on the floor. Drive bottom foot up to the box top while lifting the weight over your head.

Swimmer's Something or other - lay belly on large ball for balance, and do the freestyle arm stroke while holding 10-lb weights.

Cross the body X-Chop: Start with 20 lb medicine ball at hip, step back while driving the ball across your body and over your opposite shoulder.

Wall Ball Toss - Stand with your side to a wall with a medium weight medicine ball at your hip. Drive the ball at the wall by twisting your body trunk, catch and repeat.

3-way Lat Pull downs - grab the resistance band cables and walk back to get some good tension. Drive both hands down and left, down and center, down and right. That counts as one!

The workout was called the fabulous forty because; you guessed it, you have to do each one 40 times...per arm or leg! This means that you have to do 40 reps of the boxsteps with each leg. Some were very tough, particularly the airplane push-ups. Others like the box steps weren't so bad for me because of the overall good condition of my legs from the cycling. It was hurting a lot of people though.

The workout was very interesting because of the diversity of the stations but also because they allowed us to be free form and split up the workout however we liked. My general strategy was to try and do 1/2 the reps at each station at a time. I had to do two of them over three sessions because they were hard for me, airplanes and the swimming one. Guess that means I need to start paying more attention to my upper body when working out.