Camping Workout

Ok, so I haven't posted in a while 'cause I've been travelling.  I did a really cool workout while I was up in the mountains, and I thought I'd share it with you.

It's one of those things – if you're away from home, your workout comes entirely down to creativity.

In theory, I could have video taped it and shown it to you, but I was on vacation and I kinda just wanted to be on vacation.

So I'm going to try to re-create it for you here.  It had five components:

1.) Tree Pullups

2.) Railroad Tie Squats

3.) Railroad Tie Pushups

4.) Joint Mobility (Z Health R-Phase and I-Phase)

5.) Loaded Joint Mobility (Z R-Phase in pushup and lunge positions, and the old R-Phase squat series)

So the first thing I found was a tree to do pullups on.  If you've never done tree pullups, the big thing is that it's always going to be a little off center.  In this case, one hand was about 6 inches higher than the other, meaning that only one arm would get to full extension at the bottom.  Which is no big deal, you just switch sides every few reps.

Second thing, I wanted to squat.  And I could do all the squats bodyweight, with step up and lunge variations and single leg pistol squats. 

But I found a railroad tie that had been broken in half, so I threw it on my shoulder and did squats with it.  

I essentially did sandbag shoulder squats, I just used a railroad tie instead of a sandbag.  And that's really the key to a camping workout, I took what I could find, and did exercises that looked like things I've done before.

So it looked like this:

 

And I alternated that with pushups.  Now, I haven't done pushups in about a year 'cause I jacked up my wrist (my phsyical therapist says I shredded the ligaments around my lunate). 

But if the wirst angle is a little less extreme, it doesn't hurt. 

In other words, I can't deal with the angle of having my hand on the floor, but if I put my hands on the edge of the railroad tie, I could do pushups without pain.

So in essence, I ended up doing like "pushup board" pushups, just using the railroad tie instead of a pushup board.  So it looked kinda like this:

 

Steve Maxwell, above, is demonstrating Hindu Pushups.  I did some Hindu Pushups, some Spiderman Pushups, some single leg pushups, and some normal pushups.

 

I didn't really count how many sets I did of anything.  I just "played around". 

I did as much as I could of each, and I eliminated the harder variations as I went.  It ended up looking something like this:

1.) Pullups in sets of three.  I'd do three reps, switch and do three reps facing the other direction (switching which arm was doing more work).  I'd rest a little, then I'd do another set.  I just kept doing that until it sucked.

2.) Railroad tie squats, alternating with spiderman pushups.  I'd do five squats with the railroad tie on each shoulder.  Then I'd do ten alternating spiderman pushups.

3.) Bodyweight squats in sets of ten, cossacks in sets of ten, single leg pushups in sets of ten.

4.) Bodyweight squats in sets of five, normal pushups in sets of five.

I didn't really count the number of sets on anything, and I rested as much as I felt like.  I just kept doing stuff until I felt like form would suffer on the next set, then I moved on to an easier variation.

All of the squats I did as close to butt-to-ankles as I could.  I really used a lot of the joint mobility work to get into a deeper, more comfortable, easier squat.  One thing that really helped was working on the bone rhythm of the squat:

 

That was most of the workout.  I'll get to the joint mobility and loaded joint mobility in another post.

Enjoy!