Even though I’d made a “38 birthday workout” for a client a few years ago, and considered just recycling it for myself, I decided NOPE!! I need my own, and something goofily specific to what I like to do. So yes, there are pull ups involved. DEAD HANG pull ups of course… which can always been substituted out with Aussie pull ups or the fun variation I brought for my training partner in crime, a 10 foot 1.5″ “royal purple jump rope” from Onnit thrown over the pull up bar. So basically Aussie pull ups with an added grip AND stability challenge. I didn’t want her to get bored… who says I’m not a good friend?
Of course the 38 total kettlebell presses can be done with any appropriate kettlebell weight, and the push ups can be done from the feet or the knees, or with raised hands or feet… again whatever is appropriately challenging for your current level. The “rule” for the first part of The Great 38 is that you can’t move on to the next exercise until the total number of reps has been completed.
Obviously I didn’t do 38 pull ups all in one set, but I didn’t move on to the next exercise until I had completed them… which was interesting because while I regularly will do 50-100 pull ups during the course of a day or several hours, packing 38 fully legit, deadhang, chin over the bar reps (grip switch allowed) into a reasonably small amount of time (didn’t want my training partner to get bored or too far ahead of me!) proved to be a nice challenge. I didn’t invent any new cuss words, but did do some fairly embarrassing looking “recovery dances”. After all of that, the kettlebell presses and push ups seemed reasonably easy.
Next was a little circuit of 38 kettlebell swings, 38 kettlebell snatches (trying for solid sets of 19 each side… going a little lighter encouraged, for the record I used a 16kg for the presses and the swings, a 14kg for the first round of snatches and then the 12kg for the last 2 rounds of snatches) and 38 battling rope throws… which felt like a “break” at this point. LOL. That’s so not right. We began and ended the whole thing with some favorite mobility moves and of course the CC Vol2 Trifecta (bridge, l-sit, twist). Some amusing stuff happened on our heart rate monitors for sure.
It’s going to be a great 38 year. I’m more like two wacky 19 year olds than one 38 year old though…. truth be known.
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