Photo by Ali Kaukas

It’s Wednesday, which means its my weekly meeting with my trainer. Steve never one to disappoint came up with another gem of a workout today. The key I have learned to Steve’s workouts are layering. He takes lots of different tasks which in and of themselves aren’t very hard, but once you layer them one on top of another it ends up being a killer workout. This week I had a partner in crime, Norm, one of the Spartan Race Storm Chasers. These guys chase Spartan Race around the country doing all the Hurricane Heats. They are a hardcore group of Spartan Racers.
 

Start of the Challenge

We started out as we have the last couple of weeks, bouldering around the gym. Steve is determined to make me a climber out of this and it might just be working as each week I seem to be able to boulder a little further around the gym. I am actually learning some technique instead of just muscling my way around the gym. After pumping my arms up until they were shaking, yes shaking we headed outside.
 

Picking up two cinderblocks each Norm and I walked to the back of the building to find tires and logs. We started out picking up the log and bringing it down to each side with an overhead press in the middle. The first set was 20 (ten on each side). After we finished our twenty we picked up tires and throw them as far as we could across the back, when we got to the end (about 4 tosses) we turned around and tossed them back. Remember those cinderblocks, we picked them up and continued our walk around the building to the front where we proceeded to do 10 dips. That was one set, we continued this for three more times decreasing by two with the log and one with the dips. After the first set I went down to one cinderblock around the building Norm got to keep two, lucky him! My forearms were exploding by the end of this.
 

Was the workout over, no way. Steve had something special in store for Norm’s first time working out with me. We finished up our workout with the Climbfit Challenge it’s been a while so incase you forgot what it is:

The End of a Long 3 Minutes!

1 Minute Hold Yourself on the wall
100 Meter row in 4 minutes (Female 800)
100 Hanging Knee-ups
50 Pushups on Balance Ball (Female 35)
10 Pull-ups (Female 5 positive or negative)
3 Minute Plank
 

To successfully complete this you need to do all of these in under 15 minutes. Norm didn’t make the time limit yet but I am sure he will next time. I finished it this time with over a minute remaining. This time instead of 5 negative pull-ups I was able to get 2 real pull-ups. Still working up to 5. Steve and I have a plan to get to 5 and it is a process. After the Climbfit Challenge was over we called it a day at the gym. As my three minute plank came to an end I collapsed down to the floor, arms trembling, another killer workout from the genius that is Steve, at Green Mountain Rock Climbing!