Spartan 30 Day Challenge: Day 4

Quote of the Day: "A river cuts through rock, not because of it's power, but because of it's persistence." -Jim Watkins

And so it happened. Hard week at work, up late, and I found myself incapacitated when the alarm went off at 4 a.m. So I slept another couple of hours, went on to work, and resorted to plan B. Life happens. It was 8 p.m. before I came to a point where I could squeeze this workout in. The fact that I went ahead and did it, as opposed to sinking into the couch of comfort, though, is proof that I'm making progress. Baby steps.

Day 4's workout was a Crossfit session called The Mary, which consisted of 8 rounds of tabata followed by a 30 minute run. Tabata is high intensity interval training (HIIT) where you go all out for 20 seconds on a particular exercise, then rest for 10, then all out again and so on. Recent research has proven that this kind of training gets you more bang for the buck, calorie burning-wise, than just about anything.

8 rounds of 20s on, 10s off for each exercise. Do all 8 rounds of 1 exercise before moving on to the next.

• Burpees - mine were done in the driveway, and I used to yoga mat to protect my hands. Go hard!
• Suicide planks - on the yoga mat. Start in plank position, go down to both elbows, then back up, then back down for the entire 20 seconds
• Front squats - typical front squat, trying to get parallel and quick reps to keep up the intensity
• Dips - I didn't have a dip station, so I did them on the bumper of a car

Burpees

Suicide Planks

Front Squats

Dips

I followed this up with a 30 minute run of about 3.4 miles. It was a pretty night be running, and I felt the stress of the day literally dissipate from my pores. So glad I got this one in.

Tech Tip: In order to do this workout fluently and efficiently, I used a timer app on my iPhone that I downloaded from the App Store called "Seconds".  It is made for training sessions like this, and I set it for 8 rounds of 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off. It counts down the final 3 seconds of each interval. The price was right - free.

How I felt: Tired at the beginning, re-engergized at the end, and I got a good night's sleep.