Those of you following along on Instagram today you may have noticed at the end of one of the videos I kind of… attack a bowl of pepperment bark at Williams-Sonoma while on an otherwise innocent errand to pick up a box of Mavea water filters. Long story short, I might have had a little bit of a sugar rush when I came home, but I also wanted to get some reps in, and some small chores done too.
Enter the EMOM workout… Every Minute On the Minute. I set the interval timer to chime on the minute every minute for 30 minutes–which is a pretty ambitious time frame for an EMOM workout usually, but I had planned to keep the reps low on this one. I did a mobility warm up and set up everything before pressing start. Earlier today I brought up an Ultimate Sandbag “Strength” bag that is filled with about 50lbs of delicious smelling dry jasmine rice (50lb bags of Thai style jasmine rice were on sale the day that I went to the Asian market looking for a giant bag of rice). I wanted to clean the outside of the bag anyway so why not grunge it up with some of my sweat beforehand? Also, I love doing little combos with it. For tonight I felt more like “doing things” than “thinking” so an EMOM workout sounded like the right idea. FIRST, a basic ground rule: every rep must be good, if questionable reps start happening, then the game is over.
Here’s the version I did and the little video I didn’t think to shoot until I was about 3/4 of the way through the workout…
And considering I had to set up the webcam during the rest periods it might have actually been farther along through the workout by the time I hit “record”.
Every Minute On the Minute:
- One Dead Hang Pull Up
- One Ultimate Sandbag Clean and Press… then before setting the sandbag down…
- One Squat with the Ultimate Sandbag
- One Dead Hang Pull Up
- One Ultimate Sandbag Clean and Press… don’t put it down…..
- One Squat with the Ultimate Sandbag
- REST until the next minute
At my pace, which was not by any means fast on purpose, it ended up being about 30 seconds work, 30 seconds rest. So in 30 minutes, I did a reasonable total number of very high quality reps: 60 dead hang pull ups, 60 sandbag clean and presses, 60 sandbag squats. Certainly, this was nowhere near my max, but it was a nice fun challenge and provided a pleasantly elevated heart rate. The movements also have a pretty balanced push-pull ratio in a few directions.
Here’s the funny little video from my webcam and the Hallway of Strength:
While telling a friend about this I realized how many different ways this combination could be scaled: with less time, with a lighter (or heavier) sandbag, and with a different pull up variation (door frame pull-ups for the beginner, Aussie pull-ups, regular pull-ups, super advanced folks could even use a muscle-up if they were quick about it!)
The possibilities are endless… as usual! 🙂 Let me know if you try a version of it!
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