YouTuber and bodybuilder Jujumufu (a.k.a. Jon Call) regularly tries out different sports, workouts and fitness fads on his channel to see how effective and/or physically challenging they are—and in his most recent video, he meets his match. Alongside bodybuilder and strength coach Joey Szatmary, Juji takes on a workout devised by hammer thrower and three-time Olympic gold medalist Sergey Litvinov.
The workout is a superset, performed a total of three times: 8 x front squat (405 pounds) followed by a 400-meter sprint which must be completed in 75 seconds. It sounds like hell, and is made all the more impressive by the fact that Litvinov only weighed around 190 pounds when he would use this workout in his Olympic training.
“I think I only have one shot at this,” says Juji. “If I can’t do 405 x 8 and a 75-second 400-meter sprint on the first Litvinov, I don’t think I’m going to get it on the second and the third, I think I’ll have gassed out.”
Juji maxes out at 6 reps on the first round, before immediately dropping the bar and his belt and launching into the sprint. He takes 107 seconds to cover the 400 meters; 32 seconds slower than Litvinov.
Szatmary fares better: he achieves 8 reps on his first attempt, but takes 90 seconds to complete the sprint, so he’s still 15 seconds behind the Soviet athlete. “My calves are killing me,” he says. “That’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done… And we have two more sets.”
For the second round, Juji lowers the weight to 315 pounds, enabling him to complete all 8 reps—but he is so exhausted by this point that he barely makes it halfway around the track before hitting the 75-second mark and giving up on the sprint. “It’s not even the lungs,” he says. “My calves and feet are so locked I can’t actually, physically run.”
Szatmary keeps the weight at 405 pounds for his squats, but only manages 6 reps on the second attempt—and takes 110 seconds to complete the run.
For the third and final round, Juji does the run first to see if this makes any difference to his performance, and completes 3 squat reps before collapsing. “My body left my soul,” he says. “That’s fucking hard, man.” He acknowledges that running first was definitely a bad idea: “I was trying to get my brain to send a signal to my legs to do the front squat pattern… I was trying to move a limb that was frozen, I couldn’t get my body to do it.”
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