Can Facebook Help You Stay Fit?

Brian Tallmadge

10 years ago

Unless you live in California or someplace where the weather is perfect all year long, the OCR “offseason” is essentially December through late February at least. There are generally no races to keep you motivated to train or improve your fitness. This leaves you with two choices (1) eat, drink, and tell yourself you’ll get jacked again a month before your next race or (two) find ways to stay fit this offseason and be ready for tomorrow’s race today.

Staying Fit by Facebook… No, Seriously!

Training indoors sucks. But sometimes you have to embrace the suck to stay in shape. Facebook can help you say? But Facebook requires you to be sitting at a computer and in general be sedentary, right? But if you use Facebook right, it can motivate you to get off the couch in the offseason by doing some fun workouts. Here are some Facebook pages for you to follow to keep you active all winter long. Following them will prompt you to their websites which offer even more free workouts, ideas, and tips.

Pick a couple you like, combine their workouts and challenges and emerge in the spring without that layer of winter fat.

Tough Training

Spartan Race Pro Team Member Chris Rutz regularly posts physical challenges and workouts of the day (WOD’s) for you to try. Most can be done with little to no equipment necessary and will test your limits. He also has a website and a YouTube channel.

100×100 Challenge

This started out as trash talk between friends at Fort Strong and ended up being a kickass Facebook challenge page. Their current “add on” challenge is: in 4 weeks complete a total of 3,000 push-ups, 2,000 sit-ups, 1,000 air squats, and 500 burpees. This is supplemental to their current challenge of 100 push-ups for 100 days straight.

Breaking Muscle

This Facebook page has it all: Workouts, nutrition, injury prevention and recovery, flexibility, etc. One of my favorites is their video on push-up variations from their website. Some of these push-ups seem impossible to me, but they’re worth working towards. The website has an incredible number of free workouts and videos to motivate you to try something new. They even have a 6 week OCR specific workout to get you through the off season.

Onnit Academy

The folks at Onnit don’t specialize in OCR training at all, but they specialize in functional fitness – which will directly improve your OCR performance. Onnit is big into kettlebells and other non-traditional things like clubs and maces as functional strength tools. One of my current favorites is their kettlebell beast workout. They also have cool challenges on their website.

Stack

Stack offers a nice variety of workouts and multi-sport specific tips. They’ve been around for a while on Facebook and they post frequently. Their website doesn’t have an OCR specific page, but it does offer tips and training for cross country running which is directly applicable to OCR’s.

Ben Greenfield Fitness

Ben doesn’t so much give you daily Facebook workouts (he occasionally does on his YouTube channel and he’s got a great podcast) but Ben knows a lot about fitness in general (and I mean, a lot). He also has teamed up with Hunter McIntyre to create the Obstacle Dominator podcast. If you don’t listen to podcasts – you should! Listening to podcasts is way more productive than hearing the same song on the radio twice in your half hour drive to work. This podcast gives you OCR tips, race recaps, and more. You can even record your own question for Ben and Hunter to answer. Oh yeah, and they’re putting together a comprehensive guide to training (and dominating) OCR’s… stay tuned.

So there you have it. Six solid Facebook pages and a few extras to get you through the offseason fit and motivated to kick off the 2015 OCR season. Each of these pages will lead you to more. Don’t get sucked into social media, or your couch. Pick a few Facebook pages or websites you like and do the workouts every day during your “off season”. Don’t let Old Man Winter take you down with him. See you in the spring!

Editors Note: Stay tuned for more ways to stay in shape this winter from Mud Run Guide. What are your favorite Facebook Challenges you have participated in? Share your experience and opinions in our comment section.