March Madness Fitness Challenge

By Molly Magunga, MS ATC, CPT, CES

Hello everyone! This week’s “Fitness Tip of the Week” is about March themed workout ideas! March is a fun month! The weather starts warming up. There is still sunlight when you finish with the work day. St. Patrick’s Day breaks up the month. College basketball March Madness begins. With so many events in March, it seems like a great opportunity for some creative workout ideas. Sometimes the best fitness tip is just mixing up the routine with something fun to refresh, refocus, and recommit to working out.

St. Patrick’s Themed Workouts

• Luck O’ the Irish
  • Using Dice: Assign an exercise for each number on the dice. Make sure you hit every region of the body. I like using squats, bridges, crunches, pushups, supermans, and side lunges as my exercises. Do 10 reps of each exercise. Set a timer for your workout time and roll that dice! Keep rolling the dice until time has elapsed.
  • Using a Deck of Cards: Each suit is its own exercise. I like using cardio moves, since it’s only four exercises. Jumping jacks, high knees, burpees, and skater jumps are all great options. Draw a card. The suits determines the exercise. The number on the card is the amount of reps you do. Set a timer for how long you want your workout to be or stop when you draw each card in the deck.
• Lucky 7’s
  • Option 1: Strength focused
    • Pick your exercises for the day. These can be leg specific, arm specific, or full body. All you do is complete 7 reps of each exercise for a total of 7 sets. Because the repetitions are low for this workout, increase the weight from what you usually lift to really get the most of this workout. Remember that you should start to feel your muscles burn a little at rep 4 or 5 when doing 7 total.
  • Option 2: Cardio focused
    • Decide on 7 cardio based exercises. You will do as many reps as possible in a minute of a single exercise. Do all 7 exercises like this before you take a short rest. Repeat 4 rounds.
• Spell Out St. Patrick Day
  • Each letter of St. Patrick Day represents an exercise that starts with that same letter. Do 12 reps of each exercise and repeat twice.

March Madness Workouts

• Daily Tournament Challenge
  • Pick 4 exercises to do each day (squats, burpees, pushups, planks). For the first round of the NCAA basketball tournament, completely 5 reps of each exercise. Increase the exercises by 5 reps for each round, so by the finals you are doing 30 reps of each exercise.
• Coworker or Friend Challenge
  • Get a group involved by creating your own fitness bracket. Have a different fitness challenge set for each day. It needs to be something more measureable than just completing a workout. Steps in a day, active minutes in a day, or total distance moved are all great challenges to start with. At the end of the day, the person with the lowest number for the day is eliminated.
• Basketball Game Workout
  • While watching the basketball games, assign exercises for certain events. If a player makes a 3-pointer, you do 5 jumping jacks. When a foul is called, you do 5 sit ups. Plank during free throws. 5 burpees for ever dunk. You can make the list as long or short as you want. The goal is to pick enough that you stay moving throughout the whole game!

If you have any questions on this topic email me at mmagunga@healthworksfitness.com or comment below!