Previous installments of “Feel the Burn” can be found here.

Don’t get used to extra installments of “Feel the Burn,” sports [conditioning] fans! I just thought it would be fun to share one of my own personal workouts with you, which I did yesterday at 9:30am. By my calculation, that means the worst of the delayed onset muscle soreness will hit me tonight just before bed, around the canonical thirty-six hour mark.

It was pretty rough, is what I’m saying. Which is something I think is important to impart to people who are just getting started down the path to training:

It doesn’t get better.

Ever! Wait, hold up, that’s not entirely true. There are certainly things that get better. Your ability to move around with confidence in a gym environment (or, if you’re doing your workouts at home, your ability to confidently shuffle sideways between your kitchen counter and your couch while untangling your headphones.) Your ability to hold your body straight during moves that require straightness. Your pelvis will stop dipping to one side or the other during bridge moves. Your neck will feel less weird doing crunches. Someday, you may even stop needing to glare at your knees during squats to keep the left one from slowly migrating inward.

Those things will all improve in time, minus major structural issues which prevent them from doing so.

But how shitty you feel while working out? That’s probably not going to get better, and if it does, you should think about going up on your weights. Ideally, it’s just as bad every single time. It’s not like Usain Bolt finishes a training session and is all “motherfucker, I am the FASTEST,” and then happily lopes off to check his mailbox for magazines. He’s miserable during and then happy a little after like the rest of us.

Which is not really to say that you have to be miserable during. I’m usually pretty into it, though I whine a lot, and we all contain multitudes:.

this hurts so much i love working my calves
i don’t care how cute that guy is why did he suggest I try pistol squats
i am a golden goddess of fire but i wonder if there is a big open garbage can in case I need to throw up

My workout yesterday was a monster. And I’m going to share it with you, because this feature is really aimed at building a great fitness base for people who may be totally new to the game, but I’d like to occasionally sprinkle in stuff for people who are already training actively. I LOVE the full-body all bodyweight workout for beginners we’re doing next Thursday, I think it’s a great combo of super-challenging, idiot-proof, and completely-impossible-to-injure-yourself-during. And people who are pretty into being fit will have fun with it too, with some obvious modifications. But this little beast here completely rocked my lower body, and I cried out for release and took little breaks to press my forehead against the wall and thought about cutting parts of it but didn’t and then eventually finished and lay down in the shower for about ten minutes and then had to keep moving regularly throughout the day afterwards so my quads wouldn’t contract into little balls of agony.

But I wouldn’t have traded it for the world. This one comes to you courtesy of Brendan, the gentleman you saw doing that ridiculous box-jump last week (he trains professionally in the NYC area, drop me a line if you want to pay to be menaced by someone who is really sweet and looks like a super-jacked Chris Pine.) He watched me do this one with a mixture of sadism and pity and envy, being still sidelined from the rugby injury, which is how I will feel knowing that some of you are trying this workout on your own.

The Worst Lower-Body Workout in Recent Memory (this one, you need a gym, and to be in decent shape):

Do twenty TRX squats (or twenty normal squats, no weight)
Do twenty jump-squats (squat on your heels, jump up, land on toes, sink back down)
Do fifteen reverse-lunges on each side (like a lunge, but you step one foot back instead of stepping one foot forward, they suck!)
Fifty kettlebell swings (I used a 25lb kettlebell, do a weight you don’t like, you may have to break it up a bit)

Take a five minute break. Full five minutes.

Do that same thing again. Take another five minutes.

Do fifteen double kettlebell squats. (I used two 15lb kettlebells, see above.)

Holding those kettlebells by your sides, do walking weighted lunges the length of your gym.

When you get to the end, do fifteen more double kettlebell squats. Turn around and do the stupid walking weighted lunges all the way back to where you started.

That is a set. Take a break, do another one of them.

Okay, we’re getting there. Go into the part of the gym with the machines you’ve been encouraged to make fun of (they have a time and place and that time is now and the place is your misery.) Crawl onto the lying leg curl machine and just stay there, face-down, for a minute. Oh, the pad is so cool. So cool and soft.

Do 15 reps on a setting you find challenging. Realize if you could do 15, you need to do a higher setting next time.

Go to the leg press machine, do 12 reps, realize you’re not really going knees-to-chest like this workout recommends, realize you need to go lower on the setting next time and really get the full range of motion.

Take a break.

Okay, now you have to actually do those two things again with the right settings.

Take a break.

Last thing! Last thing, and it sounds okay but it is SO SHITTY.

Calves. But, women, you have amazing calves and you don’t even know it!

Go find a standing calf machine. Pick a setting that seems okay at first, but gets bad fast, because NOTHING cooks as fast as calf muscles except for the backs of your shoulders. But that’s another day.

Okay, put your toes on it, with both feet facing forward normally. Do ten raises. Now, point your toes towards each other, so your heels are flared out. Do ten raises. Now, point your toes away from each other, heels together (remember, your heels are always dangling in the air for this). Do ten raises.

You will crave death, but point your toes back out normally and do ten more.

Take a break.

Do that whole calf thing again. You can do a third set but I sure as shit didn’t.

Okay! Lemme know how that went. I’m over here, slowly pedaling my legs into the air to try to get them working normally again.