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.

Rehab United

Christine and I joined an early morning exercise class for the month of January called Power Hour. The class is held at Rehab United, a gym specializing in rehabilitation of injured athletes and overall sports performance. The power hour is M-F class that begins at O'dark thirty (6am) where we jump right into exercising. The gym and the overall workout routine is completely different that any other I've ever done. All the workouts involve multiple planes of body motion meaning that they've got you twisting and turning in all directions to work out your entire body.

We always start with a warm up running back and forth across the gym. Each lap is slightly different. The variations are

• Straight Run
• High front kick, short skip series, repeat
• High back kick, skipping series, repeat
• Side kick, skipping, repeat
• Knee rotate inward, skip, repeat
• Knee rotate outward, skip, repeat
• Karioka (SP?) which is twisting your hips back and forth with your arms twisting the other way across your body
• Side to side hop, sprint,
  
• Front to back hop, sprint

You get the picture. By they time you get through all of these, you are definitely warmed up. After the warm up each day has a either a strength, cardio or limbering focus.

Strength training includes

• Box steps
• Squats with and without weights. Usually across your body
• Waddling around in a squat position with resistance bands around your ankles,
  
• The dreaded ab roller. On your knees with your elbows flat on a rolling board. Roll it out then in in multiple directions. A real killer.
• Weighted ball toss, squats, etc.

Cardio training includes

• Jump Rope
• Elliptical
  
• Treadmill
• Excercise bike
• Suicides
• Running/hopping through very small hurdles, or ladder on the ground
  
• Other squatty ways of running around the gym.

Limbering means really funky things like

• Inchworms: Bend over at the waist putting your hands flat on the ground, keep your legs straight and inch them towards your wrists till you can't go no more. Then walk your hands forward, the move the feet up and inch your way across the room. Pain.
  
• Spider-Mans: Really low stretched out squat, move your back leg up to your hand, lunge out again, move your other leg up, repeat
• Bear walk: Hands and knees shuffle across the room
• Crab walk: Shuffle across the room on your hands and feet but with you back towards the ground.
• Rubber ball push ups. Lay your stomach on the big rubber blue ball and roll forward on your hands until the ball is now at the front of your ankles. Do a push up and roll back on the ball until your stomach is on it again. Repeat
• Rotating squats. Front, back, sides, backs, etc.
  

I've never worked so hard in a gym. The thing is that we are always doing something different which makes it very interesting.

We've survived our first week and are pretty sore and generally beat up. I'm looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow.