If you’ve got your sights on a race or an obstacle event in 2019, logging miles and hours on the treadmill might help you train for repetition and the sheer grueling aspect of time passing. But that’s not all there is to endurance. Your body’s efficiency is crucial to expending energy with minimal waste, not to mention wear and tear—so that you can keep pace and power for a long, long time.
This workout incorporates resistance and body-weight movements that help your body learn to operate efficiently—so that your muscles, tendons and ligaments function together to an advantage. With efficiency of movement, the speed of your movement begins to change. In fact, the energy you save goes to a better performance.
With the goal of performance also comes a mental benefit: enjoyment and even pride. Disruptors such as physical or mental stress, too little sleep or poor nutrition have a direct, adverse effect on performance outcomes. Therefore, downgrading the stressors (rather than the workout) is what will help you adapt this workout and pursue this goal. One significant way to accomplish this “downgrade” and reduce disruptors is to reframe your idea of success in terms of small increments of steady improvement over your own performance, not someone else’s.
Warm-Up
Workout
- Perform 15 to 20 reps of each movement before moving on to the next.
- Do the movements in sequence to complete one circuit; perform two to three circuits.
- Choose weight that’s heavy enough to create fatigue but not total exhaustion.
