Must-Read: The End of the World Workout

Workout like it's your last year

So here’s the deal. This year, 2012, is going to be one-long running joke about the Mayans and the end of the world. You are not going to be able to escape people mentioning it in passing, or small mutterings under their breath about how they might as well do (fill in the blank here) because the world’s going to end anyway. This is just the way it’s going to be. It’ll be fun for the first few months, start to get really annoying around April, and then be fingernails-in-your-eyeballs bad for the rest of the year. But keep with it. We’re going to get through this together.

So, when we highlight today’s Daily Buzz article by looking over at this piece at Men’s Fitness, we’re not going to spend much time going through their excuse to write the article. Basically they’re saying that if the world is truly going to end, and we’re going to be heading into a global apocalypse, you better work out so that when people are going crazy you’ll be able to outlast them. Which is all well and good (except, you know, if the world’s going to end, then it’s going to END, so having a few extra muscles aren’t going to matter much). But their workout (which they dub “The Armageddon Workout”) is actually pretty intense and worth trying out. For example, here’s this little piece of pain:

Death-Set Deadlifts

If you?re an experienced deadlifter, load the bar with about 90% of your estimated max. Start by placing a 45-pound plate on each side (135 pounds total if you?re using an Olympic barbell). Now load the bar so that you have four plates of whatever weight works for you on each side of your original 45s. For example, if 90% of your max comes out to 325 pounds, you would load the bar with a 35 plate, two 25s, and a 10 on each side (either end of the bar would look like this: 45 plate, 35, 25, 25, 10). Perform one rep and then slide one plate off each side of the bar. Immediately perform five reps. Pull off the next set of plates and do another five reps. Continue performing five reps at a time until only the 45s remain, then do as many reps as you can with them. Do not rest any longer than it takes to remove weight from the bar. If you have never deadlifted before or are still new to it, load the bar with 45s and then load four 10-pound plates on each side. If you?re using an Olympic barbell, this will be a total of 215 pounds. Perform one rep, then slide one set of 10s off . Now perform five reps. Take off the next set, and do another five reps. Continue, performing five reps at a time until you?re down to the 45s. Then do as many reps with them as you can.

Yikes. And that’s just the start. Head over to the link above to find one of the harder workouts we’ve uncovered so far in 2012, or really any year before then.