Hey everyone,
Firstly, this post was meant to be up on Monday, but I was having problems uploading the video to YouTube. So when I refer to “yesterday” I mean Sunday. Oh and as an additional piece of information – I can hardly walk today from this workout – and I rarely get DOMS in my legs! That’s how much of a killer this is!
Right, on Sunday I dragged myself to the gym because I was becoming increasingly worried that, after a basically a month with virtually no pull ups and no tricep dips (on proper apparatus), I’d lost all my strength and my numbers would suck.
Apart from major DOMS today across my entire upper body, I can safely report, with a huge smile on my face that my strength is the same, if not better than before! How cool is that 🙂 Only problem is, my upper body is in bits, so today’s workout will burn the legs clean off you – as that’s all I can do LOL!!
The Workout
Couplets again people, and you will hate me for this one (evil grin, because I just got it over with he he). Anyway, the set up is a little more complicated than normal, so listen up.
There are 3 couplets, do each couplet twice (setting your Gymboss Interval Timer for 4 cycles of 15 second recovery and 45 effort), then move on until all 3 couplet are completed – this is round 1 and I did this using bodyweight only. For round 2 you repeat the above sequence of couplets, using the same intervals, only this time I added my 16kg Kettlebell in for exercise 1 of each couplet. Obviously if you want to make it even more difficult, you can use the KB from the start – but I knew this would kill me legs so much as it was.
The exercises, and my reps per exercise per round are in brackets. Also in brackets is what each exercise mainly targets. Cardio (c), resistance (r), plyometrics (p), stability (st) or core activating exercise (cae). No strength (s) today though:
- Squats (r,cae) (R1 – 29,27 / R2 – 18,15)
- Body weight Squat Jumps (c,p,cae) (R1 – 30,26 / R2 – 22,18)
- Reverse Lunges (round 1 alternating, round 2 right then left with KB) (r,cae,st) (R1 – 25,24 / R2 – 18 (r), 19 (l) )
- Lunge Jumps (c,p,st,cae) (R1 – 21,19 / R2 – 19,18)
- Sumo Squats (r,cae) (R1 – 24,21 / R2 – 15,13)
- Sumo Squat Jumps (c,p,cae) (R1 – 20,18 / R2 – 21,19)
Please please please make sure you are well warmed up before starting this workout. There is quite a lot of jumping, so also watch your landing technique, especially with the lunge jumps, go for quality over quantity – you will still get a major burn!
Sorry, but it’s not over yet. Reset your Interval Timer for 8 cycles of 10 second rest and 20 seconds MAX effort. Because the main workout was quad and glute dominant, I thought I would try and balance things out with a little hamstring work – hence ALL the swings 🙂 Originally I had planned to do a Step-up / swing Tabata, but my poor poor quad needed a break, so I did bench jump overs instead. Below is the sequence (couldn’t be bothered trying to write my reps, but my swings were about 14 per section, which is average for me with a 20kg):
- Two-Handed Kettlebell Swing
- Bench Jump-overs
- KB Swing
- Bench Jump-overs
And repeat again. Feel free to vary the swings if you wish, I just stuck to the 2 handed swing because I wanted to use the heavier weight to really feel the stretch in my hamstrings. This workout was awesome. On my workout plan, I had written “die” at the very bottom of the page to pre-empt how I would feel after I had finished. Although I didn’t actually die, my heart rate was so high I’m surprised I didn’t clock it right there and then 😀 Joking – it was just very intense.
This entire workout was probably about 30 minutes including breaks etc.
Andrew bought me a heart-rate monitor for Christmas (I know I know, I got it early). Out of interest I thought I would programme it with MY stats and see just how many calories I would burn. It counted that I burned just under 500 kcals in this short, but intense workout! So then I went and stuffed my face LOL.
Let me know what you think of this. And I hope to be back with a full body workout soon 😀
Cheers
Marianne
