Saturday 19.4: Hero workout Holleyman

Saturday. Hero workout Holleyman (scaled), time 41.43

Yesterday was a rest day so it allowed me to go heavy today. Body was fresh and ready to hit it. Tomorrow we are going to the country side so it's most likely gonna be bodyweight, kettlebells and sled action. So I was considering between Holleyman and JJ. Both are newcomers in my training and both looked very challenging indeed. I didn't mind which one to go after so I asked Pauliina and she decided on Holleyman. So put on the clothes and do the work. Took some ring dips in the warm-up section to improve on my weakness.

Holleyman. Time 41.43

• 30 rounds of:
• 5 wall balls
• 3 handstand push-ups
• 1 clean (1-10min: squat clean 100kg, 11-15min: squat clean 90kg, 16-30min: power clean 80kg)

Rx'd version would be done with 102.5kg power cleans. No squat clean allowed. That's a little too much for me, I usually do squat cleans anyway on the heavy lifts. I don't even know where my max rep would be for power cleans. Probably somewhere around 90kg.

Don't have a wall ball either (yet…) so I replicated the 9kg wall ball movement with a 15kg bumper plate. I feel like regular wall ball is easier movement compared to this one. It doesn't matter when there's only couple of reps at a time but if I'd go for 50 in a row, I'd rather do it with normal wall ball. These plates are on your face all the time. Plus you get that short rest as you throw the ball up on the wall. Anyway, I like to have 15kg plate if I don't have access to wall ball because I'm not throwing the plate in the air whereas wall ball needs to be thrown with explosive movement.

The workout itself was a little intimidating. As I think about it, 100kg clean is rather close to my one rep max (110kg) so I didn't know what to think about it. Also 90 handstand push-ups looked like an eternity of reps. Max number I've done in a workout is hovers somewhere around 60 reps. Well, okay this workout was gonna be a longer one so it might not devastate me in the end. Thought 150 wall balls would not gonna be any issue by any standard. I'm comfortable with the movement and consider that some sort of strength.

I started the workout with 100kg squat cleans. Don't know why but after a few rounds my lower back hurt a little in both squat cleans and wall balls. Not in positive way. I don't mind if my muscles hurt but this wasn't a pleasure feeling so I scaled to 90kg. Same feeling occurred in both squat cleans and wall balls, in the squat position. It didn't help on the 90kg squat cleans so after 15 rounds I decided to do power cleans. Had no problems after that at all so it helped mentally a lot. I had good form on both movements so it's difficult to understand where this came from. Anyway, it went away and everything's fine. I'm feeling great at the moment!

I once saw this workout completed year or two ago and it's been on the back of my mind since then. I looked up to this guy crushing Holleyman and wanted to give it a shot myself too. Some day maybe I'm  able to do it rx'd. The cleans were the thing in this workout, at least for me. Wall balls were the easiest. Hspu's started to feel heavier at around 20 rounds. Managed to fight through them unbroken though.

Recap of Holleyman

This wasn't that much of a cardio stuff. That's because the barbell was so heavy I couldn't lift it right away. My body was sweating a lot but breathing was under control constantly. A good workout, nothing more can I say. Great one.