Trust me, I have contemplated this many times. I love to exercise and push myself to my limits. Therefore I get to challenge myself a little more by coming up with fun and exciting workouts to prepare myself physically and mentally for the trip. If you know me, even a little bit, you probably know that I need to be active, get exercise, or workout almost daily to be happy and not get irritable. Knowing this about myself, I have had to think of workouts I will be able to do all over the world with limited resources.
On a normal day here in America, I will take part in many different activities to stay in shape. These consist of; running, mountain biking, road biking, swimming, rock climbing, and lifting weights at the gym. Well chances are I am not going to be mountain biking, road biking, or lifting weights at a gym while on The World Race. Hopefully I will have the opportunity to rock climb all over the world, but those chances will be few and far between. (highly cherished though for sure) This pretty much leaves running as my best option. Now don’t get me wrong, I love to run, but I will get bored pretty fast with just running.
Today is my lucky day, and yours too if your going on the trip and need some workout ideas or even if your not going on the trip but want something a little more fun, interesting, and challenging for sure. I have done the research and found some great ways to build physical fitness, strength, and endurance without a gym. Below I have listed the activities and/or workouts.
1. Parkour – A nice twist on your boring old running.
I bet you want to know what this parkour is….well have you ever seen the opening seen to the movie “Casino Royale”? Yeah, that is parkour. Parkour is freestyle running, it is running through an environment in the most direct and efficient way possible. To learn more about it check out these links and crazy video. All About Parkour
Awesome Display of Parkour
2. The 300 Workouts – Have you seen how in shape the characters are in the movie 300?
All of these workouts consist of using your own body weight and any available objects in your surroundings to work out. Exercises consist of things like; knees to elbows pull-ups, manmakers, renegade rows, tractor tire flips, bear crawls, kettle bell cleans and squats.
3. The PJ Workout – Better known as the pararescue jumpers workout.
The PJs are pretty much the elite special forces group in the military. One of the coolest aspects of the PJs is that their motto is “so that others may live.” They only perform rescue missions to save peoples lives. They go through the most intense two years of training you could ever imagine and usually only a few graduate each round. So you have to imagine they have a pretty intense workout.
Here it is:
pull up 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
45lb curls 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
dips 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
push ups 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
bicycle crunches 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 25
So you start with 1 pull up, go down and do 2 curls, dips, push ups, and 25 crunches. Then you move to 2 pull ups and go down from there. You go all the way through and if you make it to the end you reverse the process and work your way back down to 1. You do this exercise without stopping. See how far you can get on your first try and watch yourself improve. If you don’t have the items needed, be creative. I used a tree branch, fence posts, a log, and the ground to do this.
Now no one has an excuse for not being able to exercise all over the world, no matter where they are.
