Challenge Workouts

Can you do a pull up?

How about one from an obscure spot?

You can learn to do pull ups any where if you follow a few simple tips.

First, make sure you’re TRYING to do pull ups from a bar (I know that sounds simple enough, but oddly, many people shy away from the pull up bar and go directly to alternatives). Get away from the assisted pull up machine and hang around the bar. Do assisted pull ups with a band, do jump pull ups, do pull up negatives. These will help your pull up power.

Get your chest UNDER the bar instead of getting your chin OVER the bar. Squeeze thru the shoulder blades and don’t inwardly rotate the shoulders.

And you need to lose the flub. By getting leaner, of course your pull up power will improve.

It takes time but once you get ONE, you can dominate and get more. The cool thing about training for things like pull ups, is then you can enjoy other challenges you’ll find in life. I was able to pull myself up onto the top of this inverted cone and then give a hand to my pal, Lisa, so that we could both conquer this element at a recent event I put together. Being strong and confident helps me enjoy life to the fullest.

Good luck with those pull ups, make sure to leave a comment.

For more pull up tips, head here.

Are you a scared-y cat with heights? This past weekend was a test of sorts to see about just that.

I had the good fortune to take an amazing group of ladies from my Calgary NW Fit Body Boot Camp  to a challenge course called Nex Level Challenge in Bowden, Alberta. As you can clearly see, if anyone had an issue with heights, it would be revealed.

What I liked about this adventure was that it was a ‘challenge by choice’ event. The organizers respected everyone’s abilities and they suggested everyone make an ‘easy challenge’ and a ‘hard challenge’. For some, the hard challenge was just getting to the top of the ‘bird cage’ which was the ladder tower to get to the starting point of the course. The cargo net in the middle allowed you to get to 11 other elements. Each element was slightly different, but as you can well imagine, involved balance and problem solving, the least of which was facing the good ole fear of heights and being able to look down while conquering the element.

Let’s back up a few hours though.

This event started on Friday night with a fitness boot camp in the field followed by an amazing dinner and camp fire.

On Saturday we started with group challenges. We were presented with a problem, limited time and ridiculous rules to follow in achieving our goal. For example, we had to move 17 people through a different hole in a spider web without touching the net, on another we had to cross an imaginary river with 12 people on a plank bridge. The trick was that we only had three different sized planks for the long bridge and we had to keep moving the planks to get across, all while balancing on the bridge. All challenges involved team work and communication.

Turns out I’m ‘Little Miss Bossy’ where ever I go. My easy challenge for the entire day was to do the most challenging physical challenges. Apparently I have absolutely no fear of heights. I ran across a log 40 feet in the air. The hardest challenge was the tight rope with a loopy rope to hang onto where my best strategy was to use my teeth to re-grip the rope. Turns out jaw strength came in handy 😉

My hard challenge was to ‘wait my turn’ and let others lead at times. It was a good lesson in patience for me and an opportunity to be a better listener. Some people are born leaders and others are born followers, but everyone has good ideas. My challenge was to let the followers speak up. It was a fantastic group to work with.

Here was our Body weight workout that I put clients through on Friday (I did it with them for fun):

Warm up 2-3 min

Plank relay – We formed a plank line (shoulder to shoulder in a row), the last one in line got up and hurdled the legs of each person and assumed the front position. Once the front person got into the plank the end person got up and hurdled to the front. We made our way down the field for 4 minutes.

AMRAP for 6 minutes:

• 5 prisoner squats
• 4 superman – bananas (superman on front, roll to back, legs/hands up)
• 3 inchworm push ups
• 2 burpees
• 1 sprint the field

Metabolic Sets (2 rounds: 40/05 first round, 30/05 second round)

1. prisoner squat
2. push up shoulder touch
3. burpee
4. lunge with forward reach
5. alternating single leg walk out to plank
6. skater lunge jumps
7. plank with alternate leg lift
8. super man T squeeze
9. squat jump
10. prisoner lateral lunge
11. double jump burpee

Tabata

20/10 sprinter start skip hop alternating legs 8 sets total

Cool down 3-5 min

Here are some cool pictures:

At the end of the weekend we did a debrief with my team, most of the people said that they felt if they were more confident in their strength they would have been up to handling the different elements better. So many of the rope passes involved upper body strength and core stability. Having confidence in your physical ability makes all the difference when faced with this sort of thing. On the hardest element for me I mentioned that I actually needed to use my teeth to give my upper body a rest. Thank goodness for the upper body work that I do or I would have been toast on that high wire.  If you want to really help your upper body strength, my pull up plan is the one for you.

Upper body strength really came in handy on the inverted cone that we were challenged to scale. My partner on this was the same height as me which turned out to be a problem.  We were challenged since we couldn’t really reach the hand holds easily. To begin, I stood on her back to get to the hand holds then I scaled to the top and hung over the edge to grab her.  I pulled her up with one hand so she could get to the hand hold with the other. Sort of hard to explain, but let me tell you we felt invincible when we got to the top of that tower.  She was a trooper and it was NOT a win for me unless she got to the top too.

There’s NO better feeling that winning at a physical challenge you set out for yourself, no matter what it is.

Here’s a ‘Body Part Blitz‘ for you to hit your back and pulling muscles to increase strength. You never know when you’ll be on a tight wire like I was:

• pull up negatives 5 reps (these can be assisted, do one count up, 4 counts on the way down)
• DB bent over rows (palms facing forward) 10 reps (go as heavy as you can with good form)
• Ab wheel roll out 10 reps
• Chin up negatives 5 reps (these can be assisted, do one count up, 4 counts on the way down)
• Jump rope 100 skips (who can’t resist a cardio burst?)

Repeat 3-5 times

When ever I’m in a commercial gym, I’m often asked, ‘What are you training for?’ My response is generally ‘just life’. This rope challenge was a prime example. It’s not likely that I’ll be in a life or death situation where I’ll ever have to walk a tight rope or scale an inverted tower, but it’s good to know that I could do it.

This rope challenge retreat weekend was spectacular. Luckily for me I have no vertigo or fear of heights. I was confident to be able to do all the most challenging of challenges. However, I think it was a bigger win for some of my clients who had a severe fear of heights to get to even the top of the bird cage, or do any challenge off the ground. The fact that they even chose to come on this adventure was inspiring to me. I think I’m just too dumb to realize the consequences of falling to be afraid of heights. I have this attitude that I can conquer anything. This attitude may do me in one of these days, but until then, I’ll just keep pushing my limits 😉

Do you have any fears? Fear of heights? Claustrophobia? Spiders? What?

I can’t say as I have any fears…well come to think of it,  singing in front of a group is pretty terrifying to me. Yep, that’s it. I can public speak, but don’t ask me to sing (trust me, this is for your own protection). Another fear I suppose (and one you should have for self preservation), is cooking. My fear is to cook for you, your fear would be eating my cooking 😉

I hope that whatever challenge you find yourself in, you can lean on your training to help you out as I did in this rope challenge. conquering my fear of song and cooking, well, that’s for another day.

PS If you ever want to conquer a rope challenge course or even prepare for a Mudder-style obstacle course, you’ll want my Pull Up Challenge workouts to prepare.

Let’s not waste each others time okay?

Most people will say that their number one objection to working out is time constraints. Given that, what’s the best protocol for getting results in the least amount of time? Take a look at the solution HERE.

Are there health benefits do exercising for hours
a day? Well, exercising for hours is better than watching television for hours, but not much. Take a look at this study:

A 1998 study in the International Journal of 
Sports Nutrition had women do 45 minutes of 
cardio per day, 5 days per week. They followed
this protocol for 3 months.

The result? They lost NO more weight than
 those who dieted alone. Seems like a BIG waste of time if weight loss is your goal.

Then there’s a 2007 study in the journal 
Obesity which revealed that doing 60 minutes of
 cardio, 6 days per week only resulted in an
 average 3.5 pounds of weight loss after an entire
 year. Not much return on your time investment there is there? That equates to 312 hours of cardio. I’m sure you’d never hire a trainer if that were their promise.

Let’s compare this to another 2012 study published in Applied Physiology: it was found that subjects dong 4 minutes of high intensity exercise got better results than those doing 30 minutes of low intensity cardio.

If weight loss is your goal and time constraints are an issue, clearly you need to be working out for LESS time.

But what should you be doing in your short workouts?

I just turned 50 and one of my secrets to my abs is the burpee.

Yup, the good ole fashioned burpee: the best no gimmick bodyweight exercise around that burns 12 calories a minute and uses pretty much every muscle in your body.

I’ve put together fast and nasty workouts with burpees and variations of burpees along with other exercises to get your fat burning workout done in 15 minutes or less.

If you want sexy results in record time, up the intensity of your workouts for a short and sweet/nasty time with my new program called: Challenge Burpee.

I’ve got 21 workouts, more variety than you can imagine and I have coaching previews for every workout.

Forget about cardio machines and long workouts that give you no results. Science is on your side when you do short, intense workouts and burpees are the perfect exercise (it sure works for me and my clients, take a look here.)

I know that you hear the word ‘burpee’ and visions of junior high may turn your stomach…burpees may have been a ‘four letter word’ at one time (or at least invoke four letter words). The truth is, it’s time to get back to ‘old school’ training – tried and true methods of getting and staying fit. It seems that in an effort to modernize things, we’ve forgotten about the simple things that work. Like jumping rope and burpees.

Burpees are the new black and everyone can benefit.

This ONE exercise works dozens of muscles at the same time. In fact, this exercise is used by the top athletes with their conditioning. It’s why they are so ripped.

But you don’t do enough of them (if any) because you might think you’re not “athletic” enough. The truth is that this ONE exercise can literally smash a plateau and jump start fat loss when combined with other exercises.

You can always modify a burpee at first (or when you get tired) with a full body extension or a burpee walk out.

Of course there are ways to intensify the already challenging burpee too and I’ve got tons of ways to do just that in my Challenge Burpee program.

Here’s a sample workout for you to try. Do 30 seconds of work with a 5 to 10 second rest in between each exercise. Do this entire set 3 to 5 times:

• frogger burpee
• prisoner reverse lunge
• inchworm push up
• double jump burpee
• plank with alternate leg lift

Feel free to take a 30 second break in between sets if necessary, maintaining great form for each exercise is your number one priority.

Challenge Burpee is full of the ‘tried and true’ burpees in combination with body weight exercises to blast fat and up YOUR fitness game.

Check out ChallengeBurpee.com and get your burpee on!

Are you ready to burpee?

How about putting the two exercises together? Talk about the ultimate challenge.

How about 100 burpee pull ups? (Cuz that’s how we roll…;))

Don’t you think your chances of getting through this challenge is much better if you had someone doing this challenge rep for rep along with you? You’ll get a full follow along for this workout, probably the MOST challenging workout around.

Here’s a preview of the follow along workout you’ll get with Challenge Burpee – a collection of creative and challenging burpee workouts with coaching videos for each one.

You can get your hands on this workout HERE.

You’ll find out all about burpees and tons of variations HERE.

Challenge Burpee  is full of the ‘tried and true’ burpees in combination with body weight exercises and simple DB exercises to blast fat and get you fit in record time.

So I’d have to say that burpees are ONE of my favorite all time bodyweight exercises. That’s why I made the program Challenge Burpee for you.

It’s full of burpee variations (from beginner to advanced) and it’s a NO GIMMICK kinda plan to get you fit fast.

Get ripped with the BEST bodyweight exercise of all time

Just for fun…

Burpees in Vegas? Do people even know what a burpee is? Do you think I can get anyone to do burpees on the Vegas strip? Do you think I could PAY anyone to to burpees on the Vegas strip? Take a look:

What’s YOUR favorite exercise of all time? Why? Leave a comment 😉