Workout of the week part 10 – Moving Target Complex

One target at a time

Sometimes it is actually a great idea to look at the posts of your Facebook friends. In between all the cat videos and the pictures of meals there can pop up a post that sole purpose is to produce instant but quickly-fading enjoyment. So it happened last week when I browsed through my timeline that I stumbled upon a post of our good friend Markus Bremen of the movebetter Institute in which he talked about having just finished two sets of the Moving Target Complex. And since we are very curious about every kind of training we have googled this training program and found it quite interesting. This is how the Moving Target Complex goes:

You choose a sandbag and do a movement cycle consisting of a clean, a press, and a front squat. The whole things goes for three rounds of pyramids and in each round there is another target (->moving target). What sounds kind of complicated is actually quite simple. We start off with one rep for every movement. Thus, we do a clean, a press, and a front squat in one fluid cycle. Then, we increase the number of reps for the target movement. For example: one clean, two presses, one front squat. Every time we increase the reps of the target movement by one until we reach five reps. So after one clean, fives presses, and one front squat the first round is over. Here is the procedure a little bit more schematically:

1st set:

• 1 x Clean
• 1 x Press
• 1 x Front Squat

Then:

• 1 x Clean
• 2 x Press
• 1 x Fronsquat

And then:

• 1 x Clean
• 3 x Press
• 1 x Front Squat

And so forth until it is 5 x Press.

In the second round a different movement will become the target. Maybe the cleans, e.g. So we will do consecutively one to five cleans while the amount of presses and front squats remains one in every set. The third round focuses on front squats as the target movement.

Fabi and I have just used a blackPack. You can easily fill them with up to 40kg but we decided to keep it manageable and were perfectly satisfied with approx. 20kg. A wise choice as we were about to find out.

One thing that I had to be reminded of the hard way: you should always properly warm up! You don’t have to remind Fabi, he would probably win the Warm Up Olympics if there was such a thing. I, however, have to admit that I don’t do it thoroughly enough and I felt a bit uncomfortable after the workout. Especially with the Moving Target Complex, a workout that focuses on the whole body in a short and intense amount of time you should definitely do a good deal of warm up.

But this aspect aside the workout was really fun. It is really demanding but can be done in a short amount of time. I especially like the fact that you can do all three movements on after the other in a fluid movement. You don’t have to change your position (and the position of the training weight) all the time, you just keep going. We have done it with almost no breaks in between, what Fabi definitely managed to do better than me. Especially when it comes to the set with five reps you should take a second for a little breather…

Since Fabi and me had still some gas left in the tank (and I desperately need to get into beach shape) we have added a little finisher workout that really finished me: walking lunges with the blackPack on the shoulder. The distance that we walked could not have been more than 40m (twice, since we walked it back and forth) but it felt like a half marathon. Especially the way back is simply just mean.

But still, it didn’t feel even close as mean as it felt two days later with the onset of the muscle soreness. I am sure that everyone who saw me walking had to giggle involuntarily because it can only have looked ridiculous how I had to walk. I couldn’t see anything because my pain-stricken grimace didn’t allow me to open my eyes and because of the overwhelming muscle soreness I couldn’t feel anything else but it is completely unlikely that I could walk like a normal human being. So if you should see someone walking very strange in two days from now cut them some slack because they have probably just done the same workout as Fabi and I have done: the Moving Target Complex with consecutive Walking Lunges. You’re welcome!

I absolutely recommend you do the same and get that muscle soreness you deserve, and afterwards let me know how you liked it in the comment section below!

I’m looking forward to your feedback!

Sportive greetings,

Benni