importance of fun

I'm about satisfied with class name nominations. I want a couple more for the 6am class and then we'll have a poll. Get crackin!

Screwing around and playing with things in the gym is important! An affiliate is basically a playground for adults. Treat it as such! Beg your trainers to let you play on the ropes, or throw medballs, or try the band sprints. Expose yourself to new challenges. Flip around on the bars, just be (relatively) safe about it!

Yesterday Mike Heinz and I were screwing around in the gym during our workouts and decided to try something screw around with the resistance bands. The night before I had introduced my 6pm'ers (name voting coming soon!) to partner band resisted sprints. They are brutal! With those fresh in my mind, Mike and I decided to attach some bands to the anchors in the floor for the slackline and see how far we could sprint with the bands around our waist. It was a blast! Mike, however, quickly made it a workout by setting up a target dumbbell on the floor and doing tabata sprints out to the dumbbell. We both decided to do this after doing our lifting and our own separate metcons. It was a blast until Mike made it look easy and I ended up getting pantsed by the bands and wrecked by the workout.

The anchored bands offer a pretty unique feeling. You start out sprinting as hard as you can and within 10 feet the band is pulling you back hard enough that you have to fight for every step forward and barely move. Once you reach the target you have to try to control yourself going backwards with the band yanking you back. Recipe for good times! I was pretty surprised at how tough it was, my legs were smoked afterwards.

As a testament to Mike's badassery, here is a video of our efforts. It shows Mike's 1st and 8th rounds on the tabata interval, then my first two, and my implosion at the end of round 7... Note the difference in how we look at the end of our respective efforts! Mike ended up with 25 total sprints and I got 23.



We need to get a harness to prevent the 'ol losing of the shorts phenomenon...

UPDATE:

Sometimes I make my classes have fun, whether they like it or not. As you can see here, Chauncey takes some liberties in the band sprints and harnesses Mike G...not unlike a sled dog.