The Unorthodox Workout

I've been exercising on my own avidly for about the last 4 years. When I say "on my own", I mean compared to when I was in high school and was forced to exercise when playing sports. Near the end of high school and most of my freshman year of college I enjoyed the freedom of not having to exercise by......not exercising. Instead of gaining weight and acquiring a bloated gut the way many people do I got skinny and weak. Near the end of my freshman year I decided to get back into exercising, this time on my own terms.

Anytime I go into a gym I see guys doing the same few exercises. I see bench press and curls mostly. I guess these kind of guys are exercising for cosmetic reasons and want a built chest and bulging biceps for when they take their shirt off at the pool. The worst are the ones who grunt after every rep trying to draw attention to themselves. I affectionately refer to them as meat heads. I worked my way back into shape by doing many of the same exercises you'll see the typical guy do (though without the boisterous grunting). There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but lately I have been wanting something more from my workouts. Something atypical.

I stumbled upon a high metabolism workout in Men's Health Magazine a little over a month ago and thought I'd try it. I had no idea at the time what I was getting myself into. It had exercises with names like swings, burpees, thrusters, and getups to name a few. It had rep counts that are known as pyramids where one set consists of 15 reps, the next 14, alternating two different exercises until you reach 1 rep. It had a routine that was made up of 4 circuits to be completed 10 times. Each exercise had 10 reps making the routine a total of 400 reps (500 if you count left and right arm separately for a few of the moves). It had a routine in which you go from one exercise to the next without resting continuously for 20 minutes. I think that 20 minutes was the longest 20 minutes I had ever experienced. At the end of each session I was absolutely drenched in sweat. People would sometimes look at me funny while I was doing it, but I took this as a good sign. This was definitely the unorthodox workout I was looking for.

I just completed 4 weeks of this high metabolism workout routine and it was one of the most physically challenging things I have ever had to do. At the end of routine it felt like I had just won a battle. Now I'll move on to different routine, maybe not quite as challenging but I'll try to make it just as atypical. There are many rules to getting the most out of exercising but I think that if you do something each day that makes you sweat......you'll be alright.