Southwood and Silence

I’ve been busy since finishing three days of sea kayaking so the Hard Things project has had to feature hard things that don’t take very long. That might seem a bit oxymoronic. After all, how hard is it to do something for 3, 4 or even 20 minutes. However, anyone who has run a 400 metre sprint race or done an AMRAP (as many reps as possible) Crossfit style workout will agree that you can do hard things in short time periods.

A 20 minute meditation was my Hard Thing for day nine. I meditate 10 minutes per day, most days, so 20 minutes should be easy, but even 10 minutes stopping the runaway train that is the brain is surprisingly difficult, so 20 minutes, on a day when I had lots of things to do was a good Hard Thing test.

Day 10 I decided to do a Southwood workout, courtesy of Dan John. The Southwood workout is a complex workout, that is, you pick up the bar, do a series of strength excercises as a continuous set without ever setting the bar down. I used to do a lot of these back in the day when I was doing Mountain Athlete (now Mountain Tactical) workouts. But, I was 15 years younger, and a good deal stronger and more resilient than I am now.

The version of the Southwood workout I did was (3 sets of 8 after the warm-up set):

• Barbell row;

• Hang power cleans;

• Front squat;

• Military press;

• Back squat;

• Good mornings;

• Push-ups.

Between each complex I did 20 reps of a random core exercise and a couple of laps on my climbing wall. It was hard, and I had to struggle to keep my form good.