Saturday morning's Combat Fitness class

It’s around noon on Saturday and I’ve just finished up showering and eating after Combat Fitness and Haganah this morning.

Saturday Combat Fitness classes are always tough, usually tougher than the ones held on Monday and Wednesday nights. I think Mr. Stuart’s philosophy is if people are willing to show up at 8:30 in the morning they really want to workout.

While all of the fighting classes – Haganah, boxing and kickboxing – are new to me, the Combat Fitness class is not. This week marks a year that I’ve been doing it, and other than missing class here and there due to the flu or the occasional work obligation, I’ve being doing it three times a week.

Today's Combat Fitness class employed the dreaded Crazy 8s. The only thing worse than Crazy 8s is Tabata (more on Tabata later.)

Crazy 8s might sound like a card game your grandma plays for fun at club, but I assure you there’s nothing fun about the Crazy 8s we do. Crazy 8s are when you do eight repetitions of the exercise at each station on the circuit and continue going around the circuit decreasing repetitions by one each time around.

In today’s class there were eight stations in the circuit: hanging leg lifts, dips, dumbbell curls while balancing on wobbly platforms, toe touchers with a kettle bell, press and praise with a heavy plate, pushups with feet on a raised platform, pull ups and skull crushers (skull crushers are a tricep exercise).  So your first time around you do eight reps at each station, the second time around you do seven reps at each station, and continue your way around the circuit until you’re down to one. Fortunately, we only had enough time during the hour-long class to make it down to two. However, today’s class had the additional burden of a Crazy 8 station that was performed after each lap around the circuit was completed. This consisted of various exercises like jumping jacks, crunches, jump squats and other moves that I’m too tired to explain now. 

In the end, since we only made it down to two reps, we did 35 pull-ups, 35 dips, 35 skull crushers, etc.

Once that was done it was on to an hour of Haganah where we drilled escaping from headlocks, choke holds and bear hugs. Oh yeah, and we did more push-ups and crunches.