A Fitness Geek Goes Native

I tend to take a "When in Rome" approach to training when I'm away from my home base, and let my new surroundings dictate how I spend my exercise time:  running hills in San Francisco, sprinting up stairwells in high-rises in New York City.  It's the exercise-geek's approach to going native, and a little assurance that I neither go stale nor injure myself by overdoing it when I'm out of town.  

One interesting thing I did last week was teach an outdoor exercise class to family members who were brave/foolish enough to show up at 7:30 AM on a vacation day to be gleefully tortured by their distant relative.  The night before, I went and sussed out the territory, noting that we had a flat, sizable beach along with a swing set.  Now, I could have just kept it simple and stuck with standard body-weight strength exercises, but why do that when there's all this fun stuff to play with?

As ROCKY III conclusively demonstrated, sprinting on the beach is both one hell of a workout and also easy on the joints, and both for the same reason:  the sand absorbs most of the shock of each footfall, meaning you have to work harder to push off of each step (the stretch-shortening cycle doesn't help you much when the surface is soft like sand).   NFL players apparently work out on sandy beaches in part because it spares their joints from the stress of fast cutting on dry grass or artificial turf. 

So I knew I was going to throw in some sprinting.

The swings, however, were the real gift:  having read about the TRX suspension trainer till I was blue in the face, I was dying to try something like it, and this simple children's plaything gave me a cheap way of doing it.  Placing my hands or feet on the swing, I could more or less replicate most of the major TRX exercises:  "atomic" pushups with feet elevated, rows, split squats with the rear foot in the swing, jackknives, hamstring curls.  I realized that a swingset was an out-of-town-exerciser's--and a group-exercise teacher's--goldmine. 

The class went off like gangbusters.  Because I know you'll want to run out and replicate the program yourselves, here's what we did:

SUPERSET: 
"Atomic" Pushups (feet elevated in swing, hands on ground; descend into low pushup position, then push up and bring knees to chest.)  30 seconds; 15 seconds rest
Bulgarian Split Squat, Rear foot in swing, 30 seconds, 15 seconds rest.
Repeat above for two cycles, opposite foot in swing on second set.

Beach Shuttle Run, 30 seconds; 15 seconds rest
Beach Bear Crawl, 30 seconds; 15 seconds rest
Beach Crab Walk, 30 seconds; 15 seconds rest
Repeat above for two cycles

SUPERSET:
Bodyweight Row on Swing, 30 seconds, 15 seconds rest
Hamstring Curl on Swing, 30 seconds, 15 seconds rest
Repeat above for two cycles

Squat Jumps, 30 seconds
Bodyweight Squats, 30 seconds
Isometric Hold Squats, 30 seconds
Repeat above for two cycles

Ab 'rollouts' on swing, 2 x 15 reps.

Because this was a group class, I had to keep the work periods relatively short, though everyone was able to get a decent workout if they pushed themselves for the entire 30-second work period.  Giving credit where it's due, the squat sequence is something I stole from Alwyn Cosgrove.  He had about 80 hotshot trainers do it at a Perform Better workshop earlier this year; these lifelong fitness folks who laughed at the idea of body-weight training. By the end, no one was laughing.  Except Alwyn, of course.