Life is fast, so your workouts have to be faster…
As always, I’m pretty pressed for time. Actually, even when I don’t have a zillion things on the go, I like to keep my workouts short and sweet, at least under 45 minutes from start to end.
Most people think that I train for hours daily. This is incorrect. Fact is, it’s not the length of the workout that counts, it’s the intensity and the length of time you commit to consistent workouts. I’ve been training for over a quarter century, daily…
Are you familiar with the 10,000 hour rule? It is the main premise behind Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success. The idea is that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to really master a specific subject or skill. That’s about six and a half hours a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, for a little over six years.
I like to think about training in these terms. If you train for an hour a day, it takes just over 27 years to me a ‘master’.
On to today’s workout…
I like to squat. Correction: I love to squat. It’s a full body workout when you do it correctly. It separates the trainers that are hard core from those that aren’t so much.
For this workout I decided that I wanted to get 100 reps with my body weight. So that means, I put my body weight, which is about 125 lbs, on the bar.
I have to have a game plan in my head and this was the first time I tackled this workout so my plan was to do 5 sets of 20 reps. You can tackle it in any way possible.
Here’s how it went for me:
20 reps in 1 min 45 sec, then took 35 seconds rest
20 reps in 1 min 42 sec, then took 43 seconds rest
20 reps in 1 min 55 sec, then took 1 min rest
20 reps in 2 min 25 sec, then took 1 min rest
20 reps in 2 min 10 sec
Total time: 13:10
(I forgot to stop the clock at 13:10)
I should mention that I warmed up with 2 sets of 50 push ups. I do 100 push ups daily and find that it’s a great way to start a workout. I break up the 100 push ups in many configurations to keep it interesting. I used to do 200 push ups a day until I did the math and realized that it was 1400 push ups a week which seemed a bit excessive.
I finished the workout with a tri-set of barbell stiff legged deadlifts, leg extensions (a movement that I don’t do every leg day) and calf raises for three sets. (A tri-set is a set of these three exercises back to back with no rest in between each exercise.)
I was pretty tired after this one, but still had to walk my dog, so we walked at a good pace for about 25 minutes to finish up.
I wore my Body Bugg for the workout. For those of you that don’t know what this is, it’s a device that measures caloric output. I use it for research for you. Many people use it to help with weight loss, it has a number of cool functions and features. I currently don’t use it to this end and I don’t enter my nutrition at the moment, mostly cuz I’m lazy. (I promise to do this and get a post out about it at some point.)
I’m just starting to use the Body Bugg and will be more diligent in reporting how many calories are burned during a variety of activities. My gym workout was 35 min and I walked my dog for about 25 min after ward. In that time I burned 277 calories. (I never count my dog walking calories, to me, those are just a bonus.) More on Body Bugg workouts coming up.
My challenge to you today is to squat a ‘harder way to 100’. Load up your body weight on a barbell and go. My challenge to myself for next time around is to increase training density by decreasing my time.
Another fun one for the books…let me know how you do!