Just keep swinging

Or: why I hate punishment chippers

The workout:

300 alternating single arm kettlebell swings (chest height) for time.

Every minute complete 5 burpees.

The kit: 1 kettlebell (I used a 16kg)

Okay, this one was horrible.

When you do workouts where you have to do a ‘thing’ every minute or so (technically called a punishment chipper, as you’re ‘chipping’ away at the total), the temptation is to go as fast as you can: if you go slower you’ll have to do more of the thing, after all. The problem is that by trying to do less of the thing you’ll often actually end up doing more of it, which is probably a good metaphor for life.

Spoiler warning: If you’re actually tempted to do this one, I think you should do it before you read about what my experience of it was like and come back to this post. If you’re not going to do it, read on.

I did this about as stupidly as possible.

My first thought was that I could probably get it done in ten minutes: 30 swings a minute, a nice crisp 5 burpees, a couple of deep breaths and back at it. Then, in the first round, I made the super-idiotic mistake of deciding that I still felt fresh after the 30, and snuck in an extra five.

Obviously this was stupid. Obviously! I knew it was silly when I did it, but I didn’t really get how silly until I got to the second set of burpees, where everything suddenly slowed down and I was taking huge gulps of air between every chest-to-deck drop. For minutes two to five I got 20 burpees a time, then I had a horrible set where I had to slow down to 10, then I sped up again, and then I started thinking that maybe I should just take one round completely ‘off’, do the burpees, get some oxygen back into my body and try again. In the end, I managed to convince myself to do five burpees — which, again, is a great example of the kind of mental negotiation that quite often pays off elsewhere in life. Then I think there were some more 20s, at least one more 10, and then a final thrash to get over the line in a fairly bad 15:55.

For the record (and this is the real spoiler), I think the actual best approach here is probably to pick an amount of swings that’s completely manageable in the front end (like, 20?), then plan to up the stakes and hang on for the back end, maybe upshifting it to around 22-25, depending on how you’re feeling. I might try that again in future, I don’t know. My traps hurt.

Jx