We’re doubling up on our post this time around, covering the entire weekend in one fell swoop. You might think that’s because we don’t have enough to talk about, but you’d be wrong. Even with the sparsest amount of equipment, both days were chock full of new exercises and challenging workouts, including a real gasser that capped off Sunday’s class.

After some blitzkrieg-type WODs earlier in the week, Saturday’s workout started off with a more mobility-minded focus to get everyone loosened up. First up on this endeavor was a partner three-peat of samson stretching and reverse wall walks, along with a regular wall-walk which was combined with a 90-degree HS hold (which we re-covered only a week earlier – “SNOW AWAYS“).

Reverse Wall Walks, also known as Bridge Wall Walks, are done facing away from the wall and require the athlete to bend over backwards, walking there torso’s down the wall. Start standing about 2 or 3 feet from the wall. Placing your arms overhead, lower back until your hands touch the wall. From here, lean on your hands and then walk your hands down the wall. Walk your feet out as necessary to avoid exceeding your current level of flexibility. When you reach the limit of your flexibility and strength, walk your hands back up the wall and your feet back in closer to the wall until you have returned to a standing position. The goal, of course, is to be able to walk your hands completely down to the ground, and from there, to lower to the ground and back up without the assistance of the wall.

The Deck Squat is a great core builder that, while requiring agility, will also go along way in improving it. To perform the deck squat, begin standing, and then squat down, lowering your hips until your glutes hit the floor. Roll onto your back, bringing your knees to your chest to keep the back rounded. Now, without using your hands, use the momentum to roll forward and back onto your feet, standing up from the squat position.

For the final skill session, we combined our favorite burpee-builder with the deck squats into one awesomely awful combo movement, in which an athlete does a plank-to-squat, and from the squat, sits back and rolls right into the deck squat. A twisted take on the deck squat that really ramps up a core workout, as well as a great way for testing flexibility/mobility.

To close out the day, class ran through a quick reminder of the hollow position before moving onto a dynamic plank variation. The plank requires the same hollow position, only prone instead of supine, but adding movement really stresses the need for control. For the spider plank, simply get into a plank position (we went on the forearms for Saturday), and then pull your knee up and outside towards your elbow, before replacing it and following suit with the other side.

After all that core work, what would Sunday hold in store?

While a major source of our recent upper body work has come from push-ups and HSPU’s, we turned to a few other exercises on Sunday for a change of pace. Class broke off into 3 groups, with roughly 7 people per group. Each group spent about 10-15 minutes at a station before rotating.

Station 1 was 5 sets of 10 supported dips, done with hands on the bleachers and legs extended straight out in front with the heels resting on the ground. To scale up, athletes could have their partners hold their feet, increasing the range of motion. Station 2 was 4 sets of AMRAP ring rows, with a scaled up version utilizing a false grip for all reps. Finally, station 3 was 5 sets of 10 Bulgarian Split Squats, also done using the bleachers, with two heights available for the trailing foot, and a scaled up version involving a one-second hold at the bottom of each rep. Once everyon everyone had visited each station, the court was cleared off, and the days met-con laid out.

Brenton is one of HQ’s hero WODs, consisting of 5 rounds of 100 feet of Bear Crawl followed by a 100 feet of Broad Jumps, with a built-in handicap of 3 burpees for every 5 jumps. Of course, the workout is also supposed to be done wearing an extra 20 pounds of body armor or a weight vest, but since we didn’t have 22 weight vests laying around, we just upped the burpees from 3 to 5.

A good way to cap the weekend’s workouts, with plenty of time for people to get outside and enjoy the remaining temperate weather DC was enjoying. Great to have a substantial crew out, even knowing of the lack of equipment at our disposal. Thanks for all the support and enthusiasm – Best. Members. Ever.