Okay, well there has been an enthusiastic response to the Challenge suggestion for across all the various fora. Everyone be like "Yo Rig! What's not to like? Lean and mean in less than 5 minutes? That's a third of the time of that tousle haired muppet Joe Wicks!"
now, after the euphoria, for the ghastly truth of what's involved...
yes, @PamJ58 on the Bridge to 10k forum, you guessed it correctly. It is burpees, I'm afraid...
hmm, well, that emptied the room pretty quickly, didn't it?
Ah, burpees... Not quite everyone's favourite exercise, I realise. Not my favourite exercise eiher, i will readily admit, but a horridly effective one, and , well, we are looking to acheive a lot in a short space of time. If I could propose a way of getting the same job done with 5 minutes of meditation and slow eye movements a was suggested on the Marathon group you can believe I would be all over it, but sadly meditation is not going to deliver the metabolic bang for the buck we require for the task at hand.
Okay so, just to scare off the last stragglers reaining who have not managed to get out the emergency exits yet, I should, in the interests of full disclosure, reveal at this point that the end goal of the challenge is 100 burpees. Unbroken. In 5 minutes.
Thos eof you who have gone 1 plus 1, quick maths and calculated that 100 burpees in minutes is 1 burpee every 3 seconds, congratulate yourselves on your mental arithmetical acuity. thos of you who are just shaking your heads and muttering that I am mental, just hold on a moment... it's not actually as bad as it sounds...
Well, it is as bad as it sounds, but it is not undoable. If you have a heart condition or other medical condition that precludes you from high intensity exercise, you're going to want to sit this one out. Likewise if you have knee or hip issues that mean you cannot get up and down off the floor safely. Otherwise, have at it! If you are shaking your head and muttering that you siply aren't fit enough to do 100 burpees, or any burpees, let alone in 5 minutes well, join the club. I very much doubt anyone here is and if they were it wouldn't be much of a challenge. If you think you are carrying to much weight to be doing burpees, well, so are we all, that's kinda the point of doing them. Trust me, by the end of the challange you will be carrying a lot less. You don't do 100 burpees a day without looking like someone who does 100 burpees a day.
For those of you, probably all of you, (or even us, because I felt exactly the same way this time yesterday) who are just looking at the words 100 burpees and thinking that is just a ludicrous unmanageable figure, well... didn't you think the same thing the day you first looked at the programme to get you to running 5k? Didn't you think the same about the aount of weight you wnated to lose at the start of your weight loss journey?
Yes 100 burpees non stop is a distant seemingly impossible goal, but you don't have to do 100 burpees right now. I'm anticipating taking at least 90 days to reach that target. We're going to break it down and do a little bit at a time and progress gradually towards the goal.
I'm assuming everyone knows what a burpee is. If not here is a demonstration:
2 things to note: firstly, as in the video, you have to take your chest to the floor. I have seen so many exercise classes where people just put their hands on the floor and jump their feet back a few inches. I have no idea what that is, but it is not a burpee. My daughter comes home from school apoplectic on PE day because girls n her class don't do proper burpees.
However, you are not obliged to do the whole plank to pushup thing. You can just drop to the deck and then spring back up again.
Oh, and you d need to do the jump and overhead clap. Every time. No cutting corners.
Other than that, it couldn't be simpler. Just like fallong off a log. Onto your face. Then jumping back up and doing it again repeatedly.
I did mine already today. I started out doing 3 sets of 10 in 30 seconds with 30 seconds break in between. I was being a bit over zealous. I should have taken 1 minute breaks. I didn't quite get the 3rd set. I took 34 seconds for the last set of 10, so tomorrow I'm going to repeat that. if I nail all 3 sets in 30 tomorrow I will move on to 3 sets of 11 in 33 seconds, with a 1 minute break and so on. It continues like that until we reach 3 sets of 30 in 1:30, then it drops back down to 2 sets of 31, but we'll get on to that when we get to it.
So, start with whatever number you can do keeping a 3 second tempo. If you can do 10, do 10, if you can 3 or 4, do 3 or 4 then add a rep each time you have managed 3 sets. If you can only do 1, do 1 and keep trying until you can do 3 sets of 2.
I haven't done any metabolic conditioning for ages so I felt like I had been gargling fire by the end. But that is to be expected at the beginning of anything. On the plus side it was all done in under 3 minutes and I didn't die. Only another 89 days or so to go.
See? I told you it would be fun.
Oh, no , wait... I didn't say that at all. Thank the gods for that. I did say it would make you fitter, leaner, stronger, though and that I stand by.
Right, anyone still here... get down and do those burpees!
40 minutes
A small diversion... a 5 mile diversion to be exact :)
Running for 60 minutes is cool, right?
