Butt Kicked

Got my butt kicked today in Core & Cross Training.  One of my good friends from high school takes the same class in the time period before me and on her way out of the gym said, " It is like a full workout in 20 minutes." She is super athletic and very in-shape so for her to be dripping sweat and say that it was an intense workout was a red flag for me that class was not going to be fun. or easy. I walked into the side gym and the first thing I heard Coach say was "No cardio today.".  How on earth can you have an intense workout without including cardio? For me as a runner that seemed ridiculous. Well I am here to tell you that not only is is possible to have an intense workout without cardio, you can hurt more at the end of this workout than you might after an only cardio workout.
  On to the workout. We each had a partner, and there were two "stations", one was a mat on the floor and the other was the gym.  One "set" included for different activities, both on the mat and in the gym.  First one partner laid on the mat and put their legs straight up and was to reach with their hands to touch their toes, they continued to do this until the time was up. The other partner was bear crawling back and forth across the gym until it was time for the next activity.  After a minute or so, the partners switched. After both partners had done both the mat and the gym activity, it was on to the next one.  The next one was lunges for the gym partner and "the Russian Twist" for the mat partner.  Now I have never called it the "Russian Twist", I have always called it cherry pickers but below is an example of what it is and how to do it.
The Russian Twist – sit on a  decline bench, leaning back at an angle of about 45° to the perpendicular. Stick your arms straight out in front of you, then twist as far as you can go in alternate directions, as fast as you can without moving your arms out of their proper alignment.
 . http://www.fitness-expert.org/ 


The next two activities were burpees. YUCK. And what Coach called "Backwards Crunches". If you have not done a burpee I am jealous of you. We had to do them all of the time in middle school and high school. This is how you do a burpee:

• start in a squat position with your hands on the floor in front of you
• then kick your legs out into a pushup position 
• then quickly pull your feet back into the squat position and jump up as high as you can and then REPEAT.

Sometimes when I have done them I have had to do pushups while in the pushup position but today we did not have to.   For the backwards crunches we had to lay on our stomachs, put our hands behind our heads and lift our faces up and shoulders up off of the ground.

The next two activities were dips and bicycles.
http://www.topendsports.com/fitness/technique/dips-home.htm gives us our explanation on how to do dips correctly.

• Position yourself between the chairs, supporting your weight on your hands and with your feet out in front of you.
• Slowly lower yourself until your upper arms are parallel to the seat of the chairs
• Hold in lower position before pushing back up until your arms are fully extended again.
• Repeat for the desired number of repetitions

The picture to the left shows how to do bicycles correctly. http://exercise.about.com/od/abs/ss/abexercises.htm

Oh. And we did this twice. In a span of 20 minutes. With no breaks.
Awesome. Needless to say I have learned that you most definitely can get a very good workout without cardio.