Spartacus-Style Exercise Circuit

It’s been a really long time, but I’m going to share with you the workout I did today!

I used to share my workouts all the time. If you look back to posts from several years ago, I basically shared every workout I did. I did it for many reasons – it held me more accountable, since I could very clearly see if there was a hiatus in activity. It logged what I did, so I could see my progress. I had actual workouts to fall back on if I were too busy to come up with something. Finally, I hoped that maybe some of the workouts I came up with would be helpful for someone else.

Once I got busy with grad school, writing up these posts began to feel like a chore. I also stopped working out as regularly, so I didn’t feel like I had much to add. When I picked up yoga again this past year, there wasn’t much I could post about since I was following online yoga classes from a site that requires a log-in.

For anyone who is new to the workout portion of my blog – I have a few styles of workouts I really like, and this ‘Spartacus-Style Workout’ is one of them. This workout originally came from Men’s Health, and was based on the TV series. It is a circuit-style workout, with different ‘stations’ where you perform an exercise. You typically spend 40-60 seconds at each station, then you have a 15-20 second rest period to get to the next one. After you complete all of the exercises, you rest for a few minutes and then do the whole thing again, as many times as you can manage. The standard set has 10 exercises, and with the 60 sec on, 15 sec off, it takes 12.5 minutes to complete one round. With a 3 minute rest between rounds, you can go 3x through in under 45 minutes, making this a pretty efficient workout, and hard-core workout.
(See my ‘workout basics‘ page for more info, and other workout styles)

I’m just getting back into the swing of things, so I modified this to match my current ability. I decided to do fewer exercises, with shorter ‘on’ intervals. I also did 4x through instead of the standard 2-3, because it only had 6 exercises total. It was hard! I really need to do these workouts more often.

I’m not listing weights for the DBs and KBs that I used, since it will depend on your strength. Generally, anything that is just shoulders will require a much lower weight. When using KBs, you can use a much higher weight than you would with DBs, especially when doing swings. For me, light = 5 lbs, medium = 10 lbs, heavy = 25 lbs.