Developing Full Body Power During the Power Outage

It's been 5 days without power at home now due to the ice storm.. When I got out on the roads on Friday morning it was like a war zone, trees and lines down everywhere.. Any of you that live out here, I'm obviously not telling you anything you don't already know. But where some people look at the power outages and damage to power lines and trees as an inconvenience, I immediately thought about the opportunity of getting full body workouts playing with downed trees.. My workouts for the past weekend consisted of finding big, broken trees anywhere from 10-20 feet long and weighing anywhere up to over a couple hundred pounds and doing things like flipping them over end to end, carrying them around, pressing them, and just basically doing stuff that gave me a tremendous workout.. It's also a great workout to just go up to a tree that is definitely not moving and put everything you have into trying to knock it over.. I would do sets of end over end tree flipping followed by isometric pressing on trees that wouldn't move.. Anywhere from 5 to 10 seconds of an all out isometric effort, engaging every muscle in my body, putting all the energy into the tree.. Awesome stuff.. Can't wait to get back out and do it again next weekend!

In the gym yesterday, I continued with the "awkward load" type of workout and did sets of Sandbag Get-Ups (SGUs) with my 109 lb sandbag (73% of my bodyweight).. You basically start on the floor and roll the bag onto your body and then get up to standing "turkish-getup" style.. I did four rounds of 10 sandbag getups (5 continuous on each side) followed by 25 burpees.. This was an intense workout.. 40 SGUs and 100 burpees total. After getting up 40 times with a 109# bag on you it's amazing how light you feel walking around when the workout is over.. It was awesome..

Today's workout was a great workout as well.. I'm starting getting miles on my bike to train for the Mt Washington AutoRoad Hillclimb in August.. Known as the toughest hillclimb race in the world.. Having done it before I won't dispute their claim. It's easily the most difficult thing I've done in my life. So today's workout started with an hour on the rollers in the gym.. Riding on rollers is great because it's so unstable that you really need to keep your entire body engaged otherwise you crash..

I followed the bike ride with 5 rounds of 15 ring dips followed by 20 pistols... Ring Dips are a phenomenal upper body exercise. Actually, anything on the rings is a great exercise since they force the body to engage all kinds of stabilizer muscles that wouldn't need to work on a fixed piece of apparatus. Pistols are a great strength move that require a lot of leg and core strength. Both the ring dips and pistols are excellent power moves.

I wrapped up the workout with 100 windmills with a 16kg.. But i had to try to get 50 on each side consecutively without putting the kb down.. I honestly had no idea if I'd be able to make it, but like a lot of things I do I just try to pick a number and then go for it.. I decided that 25 windmills with a 16kg might be tough so I doubled it.. I was right, it was very tough. I got to 45 on the left side before I almost dropped the kettlebell on my head.. Only got to 40 on the right side but I think part of that failure had to do with the fact that I already had done the 50 on the left side.. Anyways, I almost got my 50 on each side without stopping and now I have a goal for next time :)

Totals for workout:

60 minutes on the rollers

75 ring dips

100 pistols

100 windmills

Who said anything about a power outage?

All the best,

Kevin