There are a lot of things I’d like to achieve with my strength training. My main aim is to build lower body strength and power to support my running, but I also want to strengthen my core and improve my stability and balance.
I also wouldn’t mind building a bit of upper-body muscle, or at least maintain what little I do have as I get older.
Unfortunately, doing enough to hit each of those targets properly would mean a lot of working out, and between family life, work and running every day, I haven’t been able to fit in a variety of workouts devoted to each goal.
Instead, I like to do all-rounder sessions like this 25-minute HIIT workout from fitness trainer Lindsey Bomgren from YouTube channel Nourish Move Love.
It’s a supersets session that combines strength exercises with plyometric moves to boost your power, and targets the whole body in just 25 fast-paced minutes, getting your heart pumping along the way.
You need weights for the workout, and ideally you’d have either a couple of sets suitable for upper and lower body moves, or some of the best adjustable dumbbells so you can change the weight to suit each exercise.
Watch Nourish Move Love’s 25-minute full-body HIIT workout
Before the workout starts, Bomgren leads you through a quick warm-up — quick really is the word here; she moves at a furious pace.
During the workout itself, you do five supersets of two moves, doing each exercise twice before moving on to the next superset.
In each superset, you do one strength-focused move using heavier weights, then a power-focused exercise that involves more dynamic movements like jumping or twisting.
Throughout the workout Bomgren’s fellow trainer Rachel demonstrates modified versions of each exercise, including low-impact alternatives for the power moves, so you can switch to those if you prefer.
I tackled the workout one morning and found it tough, but undoubtedly effective in improving my strength and fitness in various ways. Here are my main takeaways from the experience.
The pace is fast throughout
From the moment the video starts the pace is unrelentingly fast during this workout, which is great in that the time flies by even when you’re struggling, but it does mean you need to be prepared to work hard and quickly.
The intense pace is also good for getting your heart rate up and keeping it up. You only get short rests between moves during the supersets, and even the breaks in between supersets are fairly short, so you don’t get too much time to recover and let your pulse drop.
That said, if you are keen to do more of a low-intensity strength session, you can follow the exercise demonstrated by Rachel, who doesn’t jump around for the power moves.
You burn a lot of calories
I burned 213 calories in 24 minutes doing the workout, which doesn’t sound like an incredibly high amount but I’m a pretty skinny guy and don’t tend to burn vast amounts of calories in workouts — this was definitely above average for me for a strength session.
The plyometric moves are a big part of this. Doing exercises like skater jumps and dumbbell burpees spiked my heart rate, which then stayed pretty high during the strength sections too.
It’s helpful to have a range of weights
Each superset focuses on either the upper or lower body, and the weights I had available were great for the leg exercises, but were a bit heavy for the upper body moves.
I got around this by using one weight at a time or simply doing fewer reps, but ideally you’d have two sets of weights to hand at least.
You can’t hide any weaknesses
The workout challenges a variety of muscles in a variety of ways, and if you have a weakness of some kind it will get found out.
For me it was the lateral movements in the side lunges and skater jumps that engaged muscles I’ve clearly not been using very much — they were sore the next day.
This is a good thing, because it helps you to identify the areas that you need to pay more attention to in your training going forward.
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