BAREfit, the gym I just joined, runs mostly on the philosophy of group workouts. Mondays and Tuesdays are “push” days where you’ll push heavy crap with the muscles on the front of your body. Wednesdays and Thursdays are “pull” days where you balance out the rear side of your body by pulling other types of heavy crap. Fridays and Saturdays are “Whim” days.

Whim days are always unique setups where you’ll get a little bit everything, though perhaps more of a core/abs workout than you’ll do on a typical pull or push day. Lots of times there will be an obstacle course of some sort, maybe some excercise that require more accounting for instability – and almost certainly more cardio.

But at the end of yesterday’s Whim workout, Emma had a unique experience for my two classmates and I. We had already done five stations of workout including plyometrics, climbing, jumping, and flexibility. And she assured us some final abs work would finish the day. But how many sets of abs we had to do would be determined by this penultimate challenge.

“The gym floor is now lava,” she said, throwing down some mats at the farthest edges of the floor.

After she laid out the distance, she handed us three tiny mats, about 8 inches square. We were to make it all the way across the gym by laying down the mats without ever throwing or sliding them. Not so hard, right? Except all three of us were already shaking all over, we only had 2 and a half minutes to get across, and only 30 seconds to think before the clock started.

So how’d we do?

We used our 30 seconds and the clock started – but then we used another 20 seconds or so to finalize our plan. Then we did the whole thing in about a minute and 15 seconds, way under time. Only one set of abs for us!

It was actually quite fun. Still had to expend some energy but we got to use some brainpower first. That’s not my normal experience with a workout.