Crazy Eights

This idea for a workout came to me after reading about one of the Cleveland Browns players' off-season workout routines he called the "12 Days of Christmas." The basic idea is an inverted pyramid of repeating sets of increasingly more exercises.

For example, you start with 12 push-ups, then add 11 sit-ups on the second set of push-ups, then add 10 bicep curls to a third set of push-ups and second set of sit-ups, and so on. By the end, you have 144 push-ups, 121 sit-ups, 100 curls, etc.

Knowing that I'm no professional athlete, I devised a workout in this fashion that I call the "Crazy Eights" (n.b., my favorite card game when I was younger). I've had this idea for a number of weeks, but just hadn't put it into action yet. Until Friday.

A day after returning to the Elevens workout, I doubled my body's chances of soreness by completing the following workout:

• Jump rope (8 reps/leg, 8 sets, 64 total)
• Sit-ups (7 reps, 7 sets, 49 tot.)
• Bicep curls (6 reps/arm, 6 sets, 36 tot.)
• Burpees (5 reps, 5 sets, 25 tot.)
• Dips (4 reps, 4 sets, 16 tot.)
• Jumping jacks (3 reps, 3 sets, 9 tot.)
• Side planks (2 reps, 2 sets, 4 tot.)
• Run 3 miles

The entire workout took me about an hour and 10 minutes. By the time I got to the run, I was nearly a wreck. It took me almost 40 minutes to finish the three miles. I'm still sore today from it all.

In other news, my running lifestyle nears a crossroads. Stay tunes for that and other topics throughout the week. Cheers!