My Workouts: Week of June 18. 8-minute hotel room workouts and a hike in the Rockies!

My Workouts: Week of June 18

This week, I was out of town from Wednesday on. So any workouts that I did were without any equipment. It also involved two 8-minute hotel room workouts on Thursday and Friday. I even went on a hike in the Rockies! Read on for more.

Monday (6/18)

Turkish Get-ups: 5 minutes (53# KB), alternating left and right each rep.
8-minute countdown: KB Snatches (53#), 10 left, 10 right

The snatches were a new PR, and they felt surprisingly good. I was strong throughout. I could have actually gone longer. I’m super encouraged to be chipping away slowly at my KB snatch goal: 200 reps in 10 minutes. I only have to maintain this pace for two more minutes and I’m there! (Easier said than done….)

Tuesday (6/19)

Twelve-minute countdown:

Double 53# KB Swings: 10 reps

This was a nice, easy workout, but it’s still a lot of weight to swing around. As a reminder, it means I did 10 swings, every minute, on the minute, for 12 minutes. I liked the simplicity, but it was still really good. It was my last chance to swing around some heavy weight for a week, so I wanted to make sure I got in the session, although Tuesdays are usually my variety days.

Wednesday (6/20)

Rest. It was a chaotic day in Dallas, and I had already worked out on Monday and Tuesday, so I didn’t stress out trying to squeeze in a workout.

Thursday (6/21)

Tabata Tandem: Pushups and Squats.

With typical tabata workouts a person will do one movement (hopefully a bigger movement that utilizes major muscle groups) for eight 30-second rounds. In each round, he will do 20 seconds of work followed by 10 seconds of rest. Eight of those rounds is four minutes.

With what I call a “Tabata Tandem,” I will superset two non-competing exercises, like an upper-body movement and a lower-body movement. In this case, I did pushups and squats. So rather than doing 8 rounds of pushups then moving on to 8 rounds of squats, I did pushups/squats/pushups/squats, etc. For 16 rounds, or 8 minutes.

The beauty of this is that it allows the upper body to recover from the pushups while I’m doing the squats. I was able to net more work than I would if I had done 8 consecutive rounds of pushups, for instance.

On the pushups, I did 15 reps per round, and I did 19-22 reps on the squats, per round.

Friday (6/22)

Tabata Tandem: Pushups and Lunges.

Same protocol as on Thursday. Nice to be able to do these in a hotel room with very little floor space.

Saturday (6/23)

Crazy early on Saturday morning I flew up to the Denver area to visit my oldest brother for a couple of days. We did a hike to Ypsilon Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. That was beautiful and warm, and I rewarded myself with a quick dip in the Lake at the trail’s end. It was cold.

Great week with a ton of variety from heavy swings, to bodyweight hotel room workouts to a hike high in the Rockies. But is is nice to be back in the confines of my home office with my trusty kettlebells within my reach. 🙂

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