Best of the Best

I fondly remember one hot summer day in high school when our high school football coach emerged from a loading dock driving a dolly carrying a pallet stacked with soup cans he’d just swiped from the school cafeteria, and made each of us a carry a big soup can in each hand on a five-mile run that afternoon. I was certain he’d lost his marbles, and this began a “soup to nuts” process that lasted every day the rest of the summer! It took me until the end of the summer to conclude that we were the “marble-less” ones for not sitting the cans down and taking a nap for an hour, once safely out of the coach’s sight, but by then it was too late! Hey, cut me some slack… I was a fifteen-year-old meathead at the time…

Regardless, I recall that on the first play of that following football season, I suddenly realized that the coach’s tactic wasn’t so silly, and in fact was brilliant. The upper body conditioning I’d developed over those long jogs with the Campbell’s Tomato in one hand and Chicken and Noodle in the other, had greatly improved my performance on the field. Certainly, much of my overall upper body strength increase can be explained away by puberty, but equally, if not more importantly, was my overall conditioning, which was markedly better than it had ever been before!

Hand weights, especially when used in combination with a cardiovascular activity, are an extremely efficient training tool, that surprisingly accentuates and/or helps create a full-body workout. Lets use power walking as an example, but the story is similar for any activity where you can carry hand weights:

1. Burns more calories by expending more energy
2. Works shoulders, biceps, forearms, wrists, and hands directly
3. Works abs and back by making it necessary counter the weight with each stride
4. Works legs and butt by adding a few pounds to the work load of each step

So ever since that day, every time I see a power walker with a hand weight swinging at their side, I fondly reminisce and I think “coach”, I think “football”, I think “soup”!