Friday, November 16, 2007

Are You Stronger Than Me?

I'm shamelessly recycling this from a post I put on a messageboard of friends of mine, but I'd like to pose it to Scatterbrain's readers as well:

I did something interesting at the gym tonight. The trainers put on a "functional strength contest" which consisted of these 5 things:

1. Step-ups. Grab a dumbell in both hands of your choosing. Step up to a 6" platform as many times as possible in 2 minutes. Score is weight of one dumbell x reps.
2. Curls. Grab a dumbell in both hands of your choosing. Curl with both arms at the same time, keeping back straight. Score is weight of one dumbell x reps.
3. Pushups. Do as many as you can in two minutes. This was interesting because they had a cone a few inches off the ground, so your chest only had to go down to 5", instead of touching the ground.
4. Leg lift - body flat on ground, lift feet exactly 8" off the ground - hold for as long as you can. There was tape below your feet after the start so that there was no way to cheat.
5. "The Plank" On ground facing down, elevate yourself with your arms at your side; upper arm is parallel to body with elbows fixed at side, forearms perpendicular to the ground. So your forearms are like "stilts" holding you up.

I did this:
1. 35 lb dumbells in each arm x 92 reps
2. 20 lb dumbells x 56 reps
3. 90 pushups
4. 1 minute 15 seconds
5. 1 minute 15 seconds

What makes it difficult is you're doing this stuff back-to-back. So after 1, my forearms were on fire from holding the weights during the step-ups, which made it *really* hard to do curls. So the important thing is not whether you can excel in one activity standalone, but do better in all of them back-to-back. Anyway, I can barely type this since my forearms are still on fire. Can any of you beat me?

1 Comments:

Blogger Christopher J. Bottaro said...

I haven't been to the gym in 2 months... so no.

11:31 PM  

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