Tonne Up Challenge

Today we launch the first in a new series of fitness challenges for our customers to try.  The aim is to bring some extra fun and variety to your training.  It’s not a competition and hopefully will be something everyone can have a go at.

The first challenge is the tonne up challenge.  The aim is to lift a tonne in one training session!  A tonne for this challenge is 1000kg and only includes deliberate lifts and exercises designed to develop muscular strength, endurance or toning.  It doesn’t include aerobic exercises like running, skipping or stepping, even though you do move your body weight repeatedly.

Every time you lift a weight or your bodyweight you get that many kilogrammes added to your total.  For example if you push one 5kg dumbbell above your head 10 times you get 50kg (10x5kg).  If you have a 5kg dumbbell in each hand, you would be lifting a total of 10kg each time, so would score 100kg for your 10 lifts.

As you can see it will be possible for lots of people to quickly rack up quite a few kilos and hopefully pass the magic 1000kg mark.

A few rules for the purposes of this challenge:

• Floor exercises (sit ups, back raises, press ups, etc.) don’t’ count.
•  If you squat or deadlift it is roughly equivalent to half your bodyweight so your score is half your bodyweight per squat or deadlift.  Of course if you deadlift with dumbbells in your hand to make it harder you can add in all the weight of the dumbbells.
•  High step ups move your entire bodyweight, so you score your entire bodyweight for these.
•  At least 25% of your tonne up score must be upper body exercises to make it more of a challenge.

If anyone wants a bit more of a challenge, try the upper body only tonne up or the ten-tonne challenge.  The upper-body challenge means no leg exercises count.  The ten-tonne challenge means lifting 10,000kg, with at least 25% being upper body exercises.

We will have a roll of honour on our blog pages for everyone who completes the tonne-up challenge.  You don’t need to tell us how much you’ve lifted if you don’t want to, just that you’ve achieved it.  Why don’t you tell us through the Tonne-Up Facebook stream on: www.facebook.com/athomefitness

We hope this will be the first of some regular fitness challenges, but we need you to give it a go and then let us know!  Good luck.