Advanced Partner Workout – It’s Also Scaleable!

Admittedly, this advanced partner workout borders on just a little bit silly, but it is also a whole heck of a lot of fun.  It works well for people who are fairly close in athletic abilities, but it is super easy to adapt it for very advanced or intermediate partner possibilities.

Also, there’s a somewhat excessive amount of cool fitness toys in this one, and that’s mainly due to a “just because we can” situation — all in a blissful airconditioned space with multiple pull up stations etc.  (Granted if you had seen us after this workout you might have thought we had been outside in the 90 degree heat with 100% humidity…)

We warmed up with our favorite joint mobility exercises and the Trifecta from Convict Conditioning Vol 2 (bridge, l-sit, twist).  Warm-up time continued with 20 kettlebell swings – any kettlebell but they must be good swings.  All swings must be good swings, but that’s another blog post for another day…

Then my friend and I staked out our dueling pull-up stations and had a nice friendly game of I-go-you-go pull-up ladders.  You can flip a coin or play paper-rock-scissors to see who gets to go first and be “the leader”.  For the sake of avoiding failure (and because I knew what else I had in mind for the rest of the challenge, we capped the ladders at 5)   Here’s how it went for us:

• He did one pull up, so I did one pull up
• He did two pull ups, so I did two pull ups
• He did three pull ups, so I did three pull ups
• He did four pull ups, so I did four pull ups
• He did five pull ups, so I did five pull ups
• He did ONE pull up, so I did one pull up
• He did two pull ups, so I did two pull ups
• … until a decided time to quit or you’re 5 mins away from lats screeeaaaaaming.

Let’s assume I was working out with a friend who wasn’t quite able to get those rep ranges on full pull ups… they can always do any of the variations such as Aussie Pull ups, or jack knife pull ups, etc.  Alternately if you’re super fit, you can always use this fun game/pattern with dead hang muscle-ups, advanced pull up grip variations (the towel variety is a killer, here’s Corey Howard talking about grip and towel hangs on the PCC Blog).  You could skip pull ups all together and do this with push ups or any push up variation too.  Anyway, back to the workout.

Originally I had planned that we would rotate through the following circuit (one person started with ab wheel roll outs, the other started with rope throws) for 5 rounds and then a little ab circuit at the end, but we were having so much fun, that we decided to just keep going for 10 rounds (?!?!!?).  Mind you, we are not especially sane sometimes… (and that little ab circuit will surface on another day).

• 3 Ab wheel rollouts from the knees
• Mace swings (5 to each side)
• Battling rope throws – 15 up-downs
• Heavy kettlebell swings – 10

Of course this circuit can be changed around to what you do (or do not) have at the gym.  All 4 items could be replaced with bodyweight exercises, kettlebell exercises, sandbag moves, or any combination thereof.   My idea in the circuit was to STRONGLY encourage good abdominal engagement, serious power output, and a high heart rate.  Mace swings added a circular element and some gentle shoulder mobility.