Quote Originally Posted by Irving View Post
Oh I don't know. I finished last (I don't care as long as I do as much as I can). Probably less than, but close to, 30 minutes. The guy told us to try double unders today. I didn't bother because the ropes aren't great and I knew I'd be pretty tired at the end of the work out. I'll get there. The first set I got to 91 before I screwed up. *Pro-tip: When you screw up jump rope while wearing Vibram Five Fingers, the rope gets stuck between your toes EVERY TIME. So instead of just stepping back in, you have to step on the rope with one foot, while you yank it out of your other foot.
30min is a long time to try to keep your intensity up. The bulk of our METCONS fall in the 10-12min range. 30min of that many movements & reps might start being counterproductive to building lean muscle. I know with HIIT you want to have as much explosiveness as you can for a very short duration and if you go beyond this you will start being counterproductive. A good way to think about it: Think of all the marathon or cross country runners you've ever seen. What do they look like? Now think of Olympic sprinters and what their builds are like. Which would you rather look like? Olympic lifters don't lift weights because of vanity, their bodies naturally maintain more muscle because it supplies hormones they need in an instant for sprinting. If you go longer than sprints your body will actually start breaking down muscle to feed itself. There's a lot more technical jargon to it and some of the physiology I don't even fully understand (or recall) but that's the basic idea anyway. The problem you're going to run into is w/o weights you're not going to have the kind of resistance needed to do the higher weight, lower rep count stuff to build the strength you want. You'll get killer cardio and drop weight but if you desire to put on some mass you'll need to change things up a bit. Just starting out though anything you do is good so don't over think it too much. Just know that eventually you'll want to look into some tweaks possibly.