We love birthdays and other big life events around here! They’re a great way to celebrate those special moments and build your fitness community, which is an important part of any successful fitness business. People never get tired of them, and in fact they look forward to that shared sinking feeling you get when you know there’s a challenging workout coming up. Plus, they’re a great way to add variety to your workout routine.
Yes, lots of gyms like to do birthday burpees and the like, but we’d like to encourage you to take that a step farther and really get creative. We’ll give you some examples, but we’d also love to hear how you mark those big days.
Life Events
Weddings, anniversaries, birth of babies – or grandbabies. They all provide opportunities to do something out of the norm. For example, when one of our members had her first grandbaby (Born 3/12/15, weighing 9.5 lbs., 22 inches long), we celebrated with this workout:
Welcome Cosmos Workout
Warm up then do 3-5 rounds of:
1215m row or ski
9 snatch jacks or jumping jacks
22-sec. plank
9 “Charlie’s Angels” squats with a twist (From sumo squat position, extend arms in front of body and interlace fingers as if pointing a gun. Rotate ribs slowly R and L, hips facing forward)
22 split lunges or med-ball cleans or ball slams
9 hollow rocks or sit-ups
Birthday Workouts
Landmark or other birthdays are another fun one to do this way.
In our UCanRow2 Bodyshop small-group personal training studio we’ll set up a workout where our athletes row or ski meters equaling the person’s birth year, for example, then add reps revolving around their age. Or make it harder and make the birth year a meter interval. Usually we try to include the birthday girl or boy’s favorite moves or machines. And yes, we always make our birthday workouts challenging. There’s nothing like a good shared sweat to commemorate another year of life!
Here are a couple of examples we’ve done:
Happy 51st Birthday Sarah
5 Rounds
Ski 510 m
10 DB snatch (LR=1 or 5 each side)
25 sit ups
510m run or row
10 KB swings
10 Lunges
Finisher: 51 jumping jacks or double unders or burpees.
Happy 79th Birthday Lou
Row 2000m
7 push-ups, 9 box steps (or box jumps)
Row 2000m
7 DB snatches, 9 bicep curls
Row 2000m
7 jumping jacks, 9 single-leg lateral jumps
Ski 790m
7 bench sits, 9 sit-ups
Row 790m
7 push-ups, 9 sit-ups
Ski or Row 790m
DONE!
Holiday Workouts
Holidays work for this approach too of course. Fourth of July, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, they all work. Here’s one example:
Firecracker Fourth (7-4-2011)
Warm up for 10 min – stretch
Set erg or SkiErg monitor for 7411m
And GO!
Or…..
Set monitor after warm-up for Intervals: Distance, 500m row/ski with unlimited rest
Then do:
7 – burpees
4- pull-ups
11- pushups
4-7 rounds for time
Done, let the grilling begin!
Got a favorite celebratory workout you like to do? Share it with the world in the comments!