CrossFit Games champion and “Fittest Man on Earth” Mat Fraser may have retired from the sport, but he is still programming workouts that push him to his physical limits in his second act as a YouTube fitness personality, with his mantra HWPO (“hard work pays off”) at the center of everything he does. In his latest video, filmed at his fully equipped home gym, Fraser demonstrates a “really explosive” workout from his HWPO program.
The warmup consists of 1 minute on the stationary bike, 10 dumbbell windmills, 20 lunges, and 20 rapidfire V-ups, performed for 3 rounds. “It’s just a movement that’s primarily a muscle group that we’re going to be recruiting later on at high intensity,” he explains. “One for the shoulders, one for the glutes and hamstrings, one for the core. I kind of use the warmups like putting in that prehab or accessory work. Two birds with one stone.”
The first exercise in the workout proper is deadlift, performed for 3 sets of 6, followed by 6 straight leg box jumps after each set. “You’re just under so much tension during the deadlifts,” he says, “and then you want the box jumps to be so quick, it’s just explosive, it’s hard to catch your breath.”
After that, he moves onto a snatch balance (7 sets) and an overhead squat. “We’ve got the progressions going, today is one of the heavier days,” he says. Next up are EchoBike intervals, performed 4 minutes on, 1 minute off, for 4 rounds. Fraser explains that during his CrossFit Games training days, he used this exercise specifically to test his cardiovascular fitness, and he still uses it as a general gage. “You take your average wattage over all 4 rounds, and divide it by your body weight in kilos,” he says. “You’ll get a number, usually between 3 and 7… 4, you’re fit, 5 is Regionals/Games level, but the marker was at 7, that’s Tour de France wattage.”
Fraser finishes the main workout with 3 exhausting rounds of sandbag cleans, assault bike, and max toe-to-bar intervals, and then 2 accessory exercises: 3 sets of 20 prone hamstring curls using a resistance band (“my hamstrings are lit up right now”), and a sandbag bear hug walk.
“That was a good day,” he says. “It felt good to just go, go, go… A good warmup, two pieces of weightlifting, one piece of pure cardio, one metcon, and then 2 pieces of accessory work… My lungs are burning, feels good.”
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