I’m a Hell Week Survivor! I had a feeling I’d be able to get this done since I’ve been able to do it every year, but this is my first Hell Week since having 13 months off from in-person workouts. So I knew it might be harder than it has been in the past. But I had every intention of getting my 5 workouts in so I could earn my shirt. And that’s exactly what I did!
Sunday was my first Hell Week workout. This one was called Fishing For Recovery, and I didn’t have the best start. I don’t normally work out on Sundays, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I didn’t know the main street I had to cross to get from my place to Orangetheory was closed due to a race. I was struggling to find a way to get over there, and I finally had to drive down the freeway a few miles to exit and find another street to take. I thought I wouldn’t make it to class, but I made it after class started but before the cutoff to join in.
For cardio, we had 4 blocks that had similar patterns. We had 3 different 1-minute intervals at a base pace with increasing inclines followed by a 1-minute base at no incline and a 1-minute all-out. The recovery after the all-out for those on the treadmill was at a 15% incline. I just used whatever the highest resistance level was that I had during that block. These resistance levels got really high for me and in the end my legs weren’t moving much at all because it was so hard. But that’s what Hell Week is about!
On the floor, we had 4 blocks as well. Each block started with the same 3 exercises. We had clean to presses, front squats, and half thrusters. All of these exercises were with weights. Then we had 1 exercise on the straps after that. We had low rows, alligators, bridge rows, and high rows. After the 1 strap exercise, we were supposed to row for distance. But I only was on the rower for a brief moment each block. This wasn’t the worst Hell Week workout I’ve had, but it was a good one to kick off a tough week.
Monday’s workout was called The Burpee Breach. I’m not a huge fan of burpees, so I wasn’t looking forward to this one that much. Fortunately, the burpees weren’t as big of a part of the workout as I feared.
For cardio, we had 2 blocks. The first block was all about distance challenges and all-outs. We started with a 2-minute distance challenge followed by 30-seconds to recover. Then it was a 90-second distance challenge, 75-second distance challenge, 1-minute all-out, 45-second all-out, and 30-second all-out. And all of those had 30-seconds to recover between the work. The second block was all about 1-minute intervals and inclines. Every minute the incline or resistance level went up by 1 until the last minute when it was back to a flat road. The goal was to try to beat your distance from the first block, and I just was able to beat my first distance.
On the floor, the first block was the burpee block. And it was timed out with the treadmills. Every time the treadmills had their 30-second recovery, we would have a squat hold. And during their runs, we had burpees in various forms. Because I had to use the bench for my burpees, I didn’t do exactly what we were supposed to do. We started with ultimate burpees which is a burpee with a push-up, low row with weights, and shoulder press. I can’t do the low row with weights when using the bench, so I did shoulder taps instead. And each round with the burpees, we took away one part of the burpee until at the end we were just at regular burpees. But those 30-seconds of regular burpees felt just as hard or harder as the 2-minutes of ultimate burpees because I was so tired. For the second block, we had 3 rounds of hop-overs, step-ups (which I did as lunges), and squat jacks. After that, we were supposed to go to the rower and work with the person next to us to alternate 100-meter rows and recovery rows. But the floor work took me a long time and I never made it to the rower.
Wednesday was Decoding the Drop Set, and yes it was about doing drop sets on the floor. But I had cardio first and it was a run/row.
The run/row started with a .5 mile run (2 miles for the bike) and we increased the incline/resistance level 1% 5 times. Then it was a 100-meter row. The treadmill/bike segment shortened each round and we didn’t increase the incline/resistance level as many times but we started at a higher incline/resistance level. And each row increased by 100-meters. The segments were all pretty short, but with the increased resistance level they weren’t getting that much faster for me.
On the floor, we had 3 blocks. Each block had 1 drop set exercise, 1 exercise we were supposed to do until failure, and 1 exercise that we had regular reps for. With drop sets, you use a heavy weight for a low number of reps and then a lighter weight for a higher number of reps. And after doing the drop set exercise, we were supposed to use that same lighter weight for our exercise until failure. The drop set exercises were seated shoulder presses, seated low rows, and chest presses. For the until failure exercises, we just did as many as we could until we lost our form and couldn’t continue. For me, this varied a lot, but I tried to get at least 6 reps done for each. We had tricep extensions, hammer curls, and chest flies. And for the last exercises, they were all jumping-type exercises like jumping jacks. I really couldn’t do those that day (and rarely can do them), so I did different types of squats instead.
Friday was one of the hardest Hell Week workouts I can remember. I know I’ve had some tough ones, but this one was just that much harder. This workout was called Meltdown, and I feel like it was a good description for it.
For cardio, we had a run/exercise block (like a run/row but floor exercises instead of rowing). Cardio started with a .1 mile run (.4 for the bike) and increased by .05 miles (or .2 for the bike) each round. After the run/bike work, we went to the floor and had the same 4 exercises each time. We had single-arm clean to press, plank single-arm low rows, single-arm snatches, and single-arm hold with lateral step-ups (I did these as lunges). The first time on the floor we had 4 reps and it increased by 2 reps each time. It was a lot of work and I was exhausted. But that was probably the easier part of the workout.
On the rower, we pretty much had a 23-minute row. It was broken up into segments and we had some rest between each segment, but it was still a lot of rowing. And after the floor, my hip was really hurting so I knew I’d be struggling with the row. The first segment on the rower was a 4.5-minute row for distance. I wasn’t able to do this without stopping, but I tried. We looked at our distance after that was done and then reset the rower because the goal was to match the distance for the next 3 blocks. The next block had a 90-second push row, 1-minute base row, 1-minute push row, 30-second base row, and a 30-second all-out row. Again, I needed breaks but I tried to do what I could. The 3rd block was probably the hardest one. We had 10 rounds of 20-seconds of an all-out row and 10-seconds to do a recovery row. Having double the effort than recovery is just really hard, and doing it for 10 rounds is that much harder. And the last round was 10 rounds of 10-seconds of an all-out row and 20-seconds of a recovery row. This was a little better, but I was so tired by this point that it didn’t feel much easier. While I love challenging myself, this might have been a bit much for me and I was glad when it was done so I could rest.
And my final Hell Week workout was on Saturday. This one was called Pyramid Scheme and not only was it a Hell Week workout, but it was also a 90-minute workout too! This was not something I necessarily planned, but my usual class was a 90-minute one. And since I didn’t know when I could do my final workout, I decided I might as well end on an extra challenging class. So we had the regular Hell Week workout and then did an extra rotation around the room. And it was a 3 group class so we had equal time on cardio, rowing, and the floor.
The pyramid idea was very clear in the cardio work. We started with a 90-second distance challenge followed by 30 seconds to recover. Then we had a 75-second challenge, 1-minute all-out, 45-second all-out, and 30-second all-out. And between each one, we had 30 seconds to recover. Then we went back up and went from 45-seconds back to 90-seconds again. When we had our next rotation around the room for the extra 30 minutes of class, we had another pyramid with 30-seconds, 1-minute, and 2-minutes of all-outs of distance challenges before going back down to 30-seconds.
On the rower, the first half of the main block was timed out with cardio going from the 90-second challenge down to 30-seconds. But after we did the 30-seconds, we didn’t work out way back up but had distance rows with lunges between. And for the bonus block, we started timed out with cardio again for the first half and then had distance rows with high knees between each row.
And on the floor, we started by learning the mystery number of squats we had to do in the middle of the block. For my group, we had 80 squats. But before that, we had other exercises. We had low rows on the straps and chest presses with weights. We had a round of 40 reps, then a round of 20 reps, and finally a round of 10 reps. Then we had our squats before moving on to the next half of the block. We had bicep curls on the straps and overhead tricep extensions. For those, we started with 10 reps and worked up. But I only got started on the 20 reps of the bicep curls on the straps before the block was done. And for the bonus block, we had hip hinge swings, plank jacks, squats, and plank hops (which I did as mountain climbers). For those, we started with 20 reps and then had 10 reps and 5 reps. By the time I was done on the floor, I was so exhausted. I possibly overdid it a bit this past week, but it was worth it because I hit my goal and did all 5 of the workouts I wanted to do!
I’m still a bit sore from all my workouts last week and I know this week might kick off my bad week. So I’m not planning on going too crazy in my workouts. I know I’m recovering still from all the work I did last week and I need to allow my body to get back to normal. But I’m still proud of what I did and that I continued my streak of being a Hell Week survivor!
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