Several of our members took on a 6 week challenge during June/July to clean up their eating and make time for workouts. The challenge consisted of a strict 21 days of no grains, no dairy, no sugar and limited starches along with increasing water intake and working out at least 5 times a week. Points were awarded for staying on track with food, getting 64oz of water in a day and hitting 5 workout days per week. Points were deducted for “cheat meals” (anything not on board with the plan, sweets, booze, etc). 6 weeks was no joke. While we had several people rocking the challenge with perfect points for the first 4 weeks, sticking to it tooth and nail for 6 weeks was not easy. We had 3 members make it the entire challenge with a perfect score!
In addition to the points, we did the benchmark of Christine at the start and retested at the end of the challenge. “Christine” is :
3 Rounds of:
500m Row
12 Body Weight Deadlift (or a challenging weight),
21 Box Jumps 24”/20”
If you have not done this workout before, give it a try. It is NOT easy and doing it twice in 6 weeks is fun! Everyone that did the challenge improved on the benchmark. We used the initial time and the restest time and then found the percentage decrease in time. The person that improved the most decreased their time by 31%. On a workout that took people anywhere from 13-21 minutes, that is huge!
So now what you all want to know… Who won?????
We decided that the overall winner would be the person that maintained a perfect score during the entire 6 weeks and improved the most. That person is Allan Hebbert. For those of you who don’t know Allan, he has been a member at Outlier since February 2015. His background is competitive baseball where he was a pitcher for the Florida Marlins. Allan’s pre-challenge routine included eating a few chocolate chip cookies every night after dinner, which he gave up and the last time we talked to him, he had not started back up! We asked Allan what helped to make it through the 6 weeks and he said having his wife doing the challenge with him was huge, and that at night, when he would want to eat cookies, he would go to bed instead! Allan also had issues pitching when he started with Outlier and is now able to throw again.
We don’t want to discount the efforts of anyone that did this challenge. Whether or not you had a really bad week or stopped tracking points, you made a decision to try changing up how you eat and move towards a healthier lifestyle. The gym is only 1 hours of your day (for most of you, some maybe 2). The other 22-23 hours is where you are able to make huge gains. What you eat, how you handle stress, making a commitment to getting your workouts in, hydrating, getting adequate sleep… Those all play a he role in your success. We are proud of all of our members that did the challenge!
Our runner up winners go out to Justyna and Lindsay for perfect points, and Jennifer S. for benchmark improvement (31%). You will all be getting some gym cash to use on clothing, kill cliff, perfect bars etc. Allan will be getting some cash and the title of challenge champ (we’ll see if he’s up for defending that title for the next challenge)!