Picture this: you’re outside on a blistering summer day, doing a workout that you’re just sure is banned under the Geneva Convention. All of your muscles feel like they’re on fire, you can barely catch your breathe, you’re starting to get tunnel vision, and you’re fighting like hell not to puke. You have the vague sense that your workout partner is next to you screaming at you to keep going, but your senses aren’t working well enough for you to be sure.
Sounds like fun, right?
As a NARP (non-athletic regular person) who was caught up training with high level athletes, I often wound up being stuck doing these sorts of workouts, and let me tell you, they fucking suck. There is no way around it, especially when you’re doing it with a group and have a trainer/coach watching over to be sure that everyone is giving it absolutely everything they’ve got. These types of workouts are designed to be as physically and mentally grueling as humanly possible.
The Massachusetts State Troopers recently got into hot water for making a class of trainees do one of these types of workouts. The instructors made the recruits do bear crawls (walking on all fours without letting your knees touch the ground) for distance on hot pavement. Some of the recruits ended up with blisters on their hands and the instructors were reassigned and punished for making the recruits do this. Meanwhile, I did these a few years back, hot pavement and all, and when a couple of the parents came to pick up their kids after the workout, not one of them complained to the coach about it. They all were well-versed in the purpose behind the workout, and a few of them expressed their appreciation for the workout.
While I wouldn’t necessarily choose hot pavement as the setting for bear crawls (though I have endured them and would do them again if I had to), exercises like that are my favorites, both as a coach and an athlete.
Why do I love these god-awful workouts so much?
Because as all my Calvin and Hobbes fans know, being miserable builds character.
The beauty of these types of workouts is that they challenge not just your body, but your mind, and they push you to (and often past) your limits. We often think of our limits as being physical, but often times, they’re mental. When you believe that you can’t do something, you give up, whether you realize it or not, and it limits what you can do. However, if you can bear down, grit your teeth, and keep pushing forward, the world becomes your oyster. That is the exact skill that these workouts teach.
The first time that I did one of these workouts, it was pushing a prowler sled (seen below) with a couple of hockey players who were in significantly better shape than me. The sled was on pavement and had 180 lbs stacked on it. There were cones set up about 65 feet apart, and we would take turns pushing the sled. Person 1 would push it down, Person 2 would push it back, and Person 3 would it down. Then Person 1 would push it back, Person 2 would push it down, etc. for 7 total rounds per person. The first round was easy. The third round had you sucking wind. By the fifth round, you would throw yourself down on the ground in between your turns because your legs were on fire. By the sixth round, you’d be fighting like hell for every step. By the seventh round, it was almost impossible to pick up your leg and move it a few inches. You become acutely aware of just how much effort a single step can take, and the only thing that keeps you going is the voice in your head (that is actually from your coach screaming at you) that is telling you to just put one foot in front of the other. You finish your last round and collapse onto the ground.
Before I left the gym that day, I asked the coach what muscles that workout was designed to hit. The coach grinned like the cat that ate the canary, and pointed to his head without saying a word. It would have been a perfectly scripted moment, except for the fact that my brain was still trying to figure out if I was dead or not, so I didn’t understand what he meant. He explained that the workout is great for both cardiovascular and strength work, but that the main purpose was to toughen us up and teach us how to grind through challenges. Sometimes in life, you face challenges that seem absolutely insurmountable. When that happens, you just have to focus on putting one foot in front of the other, no matter how difficult it is.
Seaotter Fitness 