Lower & Upper Body Dumbbell Challenge - A Real Metabolism Booster!

Cathe Live Review – Lower Body - Upper Body Dumbbell Challenge Live.

This is a Cathe Live total body strength workout that, with the right weights, will help you build lean muscle mass and rev up your metabolism! In places I was breathing hard and was fairly drenched in sweat by the end of this workout – mainly due to the higher reps and short rest periods between exercises. This is a fairly intense strength workout that burned out each body part before moving on to the next and finished up with a tough core section. It clocks in at just over 1 hour in length. This is an extremely effective workout but I felt it lacks a little of the fun factor. For me there was quite a lot of repetition (and as I suffer from exercise ADD this is challenging particularly with higher reps!) and I also wasn’t a huge fan of the core section. The first exercise in particular placed more stress on my back than on my core…

(In case you are not familiar with Cathe Live - it is a streaming service from veteran fitness professional Cathe Friedrich, where she provides access to her live classes filmed at her gym in Jersey. Currently, there are over 200 workouts available in the archive, which you can access at any time and a new class is recorded nearly every week. More details are provided at the end of this article).

The Workout

The workout is structured into groups of exercises that are each repeated. It starts with 2 sets of 3 exercises for lower body then moves to upper body for 5 sets of 2-3 exercises and finishes with 4 core exercises. I used the same weights as Cathe (listed below), except for the 2nd set of upright rows – I dropped to 12# dbs. However, for this set Cathe did 8 reps then started alternating 1 arm then both arms so next time I might try and stick with the 15’s. I also stayed with my 15’s for sweeping curls for both sets and used 10’s for the crazy 8’s.

What you need to know

(Rating scale – 1= lowest & 5 = highest).

The Moves

Lower Body – Upper Body Dumbbell Challenge is 63 minutes long. It aired on 18th Oct 2018. The warm up is fairly active and ends with some serious lower body work – lifting legs to the side whilst waving arms overhead in the same direction, then a series of bodyweight front lunges, squats and back lunges – moving through this with various rep patterns. Then you pick up your weights to start your first triset. (Included below are the weights Cathe used – you can obviously modify for what works for you).

Lower Body Set 1 (repeat once):

· Static lunge (16 reps each side) – two 15# dbs

· Squats (24 reps) – two 15# dbs

· Slide back lunge (16 reps each side) – two 10# dbs and gliding device (shown below)

Lower Body Set 2 (repeat once):

· Crossback lunges (8 sets of 3 pulses, 8 singles, 1x 15 pulses) – two 15# dbs

· Side slide lunge (8 sets of 1 slow then 2 fast) – one 15# db and gliding device

· Front lunge (16 reps each side) – two 12# dbs

Upper Body Set 1 (repeat once):

· Upright row (16 reps. 2nd time through she does 8 reps then starts alternating 1 arm then both) – two 15# dbs (shown below)

· O/H press (16 reps) – two 12# dbs

· Lateral raise (various reps of side lateral raises mixed with side, front & down and just side then front & back) - two 5# dbs

Upper Body Set 2 (repeat once):

· Bicep curls (8 reps) – two 15# dbs

· Sweeper Curls (8 reps) - two 15# dbs & two 12# dbs (2nd set)

· Crazy 8's (24 reps) – two 10# & two 8# dbs (2nd set)

Upper Body Set 3 (repeat once):

· 1 Arm row (16 reps) - one 15 & 5# dbs (I used one 20# dumbbell)

· Rear flys (4 sets of 3 flys) - two 12# dbs

Upper Body Set 4 (repeat once):

· O/H tricep ext's (10 reps) – two 12# dbs

· Kickbacks (16 reps) – two 12# dbs

· Pushups (16 reps) & tricep pushups for the 2nd time (12 reps)

Upper Body Set 5 (repeat once):

· Close grip bench press (24 reps & 16 reps for 2nd time around) - two 12# dbs

· Chest flys with leg extensions (12 reps) – two 15# dbs (shown below)

Core (repeat once):

· Lying on your back raise arms straight up holding dumbbells and raise straight legs up to touch your hands – two 5# dbs

· Reverse crunches

· L Position crunches

· Bike Manoeuvre

The workout end with a nice cool down to stretch out all of those hardworking muscles.

Take Action - Try it today! Cathe Live is a streaming service available from Cathe.com – you can subscribe to monthly ($9.99 pm), six monthly or yearly plans and the service offers over 200 live workouts in the archive for you to access at any time.