Mike’s Tabata
It was a very rare moment at the newly named, “Joe’s Gym” as so dubbed by the early Christmas present I got from my 6 year old son in the form of a t-shirt with a barbell and the above name embedded on the front. There were three of us (My old partner Mike, a local high school teacher and myself) crowding the garage gym with three kerosene heaters blaring to keep it at a balmy 50°F while the outside temp never went above 10°F. It was 3° when I went out at 10am to fire up the heaters, and when we closed shop around 8pm my temp gauge in the carport read -2°. yes, that’s a minus sign in front of that 2. So much for global warming. (To clarify, we didn’t spend 14 hours in the gym, there was lots of eating, talking and football watching going on all day)
Anyway, with the limited quarters and absolutely no way we could do any running, Mike devised a tabata routine with 3 stations; bench press, dead-lift and pull-ups. Eight rounds at each station and then rotating to the next station for eight more rounds, etc. Dead-lift was set at 205#, Bench Press was 155# and pull-ups of course was your body weight. In tabata form, you “work” for 20 seconds and rest for 10, never stopping until in this case all 24 rounds had been completed.
I started on the pull-up station first, which was good to be fresh there as it’s my weakest of the three. I went to bench press next and after the first set, quickly realised I couldn’t do 155# and lowered it to 135#.
My results were as follows;
Pull-ups: 44
Bench Press: 23 (with lowered weight)
Dead-lift: 26
Total = 93
I didn’t do too bad, but had the cheat of a lowered bench press. I know without any hesitation that I performed much better than I would have if I had done this alone. Saving face with two other males in the room is a great motivator for moving heavy loads farther and faster.
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