Thanks to Haagen-Dazs for encouraging me to take my yearly Animal House Q. The options at this site are extraordinary but I was given instructions to save Wile E.’s legs, so I shifted from my plan and focused on the upper body, with a little bit of the glutes thrown in for good measure. Father Time has made me appreciate the advantages of a longer dynamic warmup and I wanted to incorporate more movement into that warmup. For the ME, I wanted to explore how variety in a familiar movement can promote strength, so we kept our rep count low and our variations high. Also, I have become enamored with the “grease-the-groove” notion that we should be working consistently with good form but never to the point of failure.

To minimize disturbing the tranquility of the PE teacher’s breakfast, we moseyed to the track where we were joined by a speedy Food Lion. Warm up on track as follows:

Mountain Bear Crawl. Neck rolls, shoulder rolls, overhead clap. Straight-legged Bear Crawl (aka. Daddy Long Legs). Slow squat, bushwacker, seal claps. Crawl Bear. Imperial Squat Walkers, Hillbilly Haze, bent over Michael Phelps. Cat Crawl. Mosey remainder of the track.

PAX positioned themselves on the track facing their favorite pull-up bar.

PAX had 20 s to complete a merkin exercise and a core exercise. Following the merkin “buy-in”, the core exercise was performed for the remainder of the 20s interval and immediately began the next interval. Number of merkins escalated at each interval from 1, to 2, to 3 to 4. After the 4th set, PAX had 40s to complete 3 Burpee Pullups (aka Mexican Jumping Beans) and could rest before beginning the next set of merkin/core exercises. Each set equaled 10 total merkins and 3 Burpee Pullups for a total of 140 merkins (of varying difficulty) and 42 Burpee Pullups.

Set 1. From the knee merkins-High Plank
Set 2. Wide Leg merkins- Side Plank Right
Set 3. Regular merkins- Side Plank Left
Set 4. Just the top- LBC
Set 5. Just the bottom- Reverse Crunch
Set 6. Offset Right- Chilly Willy
Set 7. Offset Left- Flutter Kick
Set 8. Diamond merkins- X-Factors
Set 9. Scorpion Right Leg- Slow donkey kick Right
Set 10. Scorpion Left Leg- Slow donkey kick Left
Set 11. Spiderman Right Leg- Plank with elbows and left knee on ground. Extend right leg to the right side and as far forward as possible while keeping the knee straight, return leg to start position
Set 12. Spiderman Left Leg- As above using the left leg
Set 13. Dry Dock- V-up
Set 14. Regular merkins- Frozen Freddie Mercury

Fellowship Lap and return to pull-up bars for sets of 30s bar work:15s rest

Set 1: Max pullups
Set 2. Negatives
Set 3. Dead Hang
Set 4. Active Hang
Set 5. Dead Hang
1 minute rest
Set 6. Testicular Drop (IYKYK)

Mosey to Startex
Mary- side-lying leg holds with small circles. Tall boat toe-touches

COT
Gratitude for the PAX. Prayers for Footjoy and his family. Prayers for God’s Grace when we act stupidly. Ended with St. Francis Prayer.