Saturday, May 23, 2009

ParCourse: Still a Good Workout

You have probably seen a ParCourse fitness circuit around at some point. I came across one last night in Wrentham, MA situated in between the state hospital and all the sports fields. It has 12 stations and enables you to get a pretty good workout even though it is has been around for a while. I walked the course last night - while I waited for my daughter to finish a hoop workout with Missy Traversi. A few of the stations that I liked were station 8 (abs) and station 9 that involved a push-up station (see photo). After completing a set of 20 push-ups on the "lower" bar, I then tried 20 inverted rows (think modified pull-up) on the "higher" of the three push-up bars. It worked out great - on my way back I tried it again. You can obviously run this course and it would make a nice circuit to mix in most of these 12 stations. If you happen to be in the area, or have a similar course in your location, give it a try...you can always improvise! Of course I had to find a research paper on the subject. Finally, if you happen to live in WA check this out - it has some locations of the ParCourses in the area, hard to imagine there were more than 4500 of these courses built starting in CA back in the late 70's.

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