Last weekend my training partner and I got our USA Weightlifting Level 1 Sports Performance Coach Certifications so I was planning on doing a post all about Olympic Lifting and how specialized and cool it is but we had such a killer workout this past week that I’ve decided to save the Olympic Lifting for a later time…

You may have read my previous HIIT post about a 90 minute high intensity partner workout and thought I was nuts. Well, here’s another one! This one is different for a few reasons though:

• Its driven by music
• You can do it alone or with a partner
• You can program it to be very specific to your goals

Sound good? OK, great! It’s super simple and actually a whole lot of fun. The cool part is that it’s driven by music so you never really know how long you’re going to be working any one set of exercises. It’s kinda fun to find yourself praying for the end of the song or feeling really lucky about a short song that just finished 🙂

The rules are so easy even a 4th grader could follow them!  Write up a workout with a list of supersets or compound sets.  Recall that a superset is 2 exercises that complement each other, usually opposing muscles (like biceps/triceps or chest/back) but you can also pair upper & lower or something as simple as push/pull. A compound set is 2 exercises that target the same muscle group but in a slightly different way. If it’s not obvious the latter is quite a bit tougher. Anyway, write up a list of exercise pairs using either supersets or compound sets and make the repetition count something like 10-15 based on preference and whether you want a little more cardio/endurance (higher reps lower weight) or a little more of a strength workout (lower reps higher wight). Then, repeat that group either twice or three times depending on (a) how much time you have and/or (b) how many muscle groups you are targeting.

Create yourself a playlist that has the same number of songs as you have exercise pairs and you are ready to go! Just start cranking out the sets by bouncing between the 2 exercises in each set until the next song comes on, then move to the next set. There are no planned breaks here but if you need to, the best thing to do would be take a short break between songs or every other song or something like that. We simply go until we have no choice but to stop to get a quick drink of water or breathe or whatever.

Here’s the workout we just did, the playlist was 1 hour and 29 minutes long so this was truly a super HIIT session! Note that in this workout we used compound sets and there are 3 groups progressing as follows:  legs/plyo, chest, legs, shoulders, back, arms, core.  And… repeat!

box jump x 12, plyo lunge x 12

push up x 24, chest fly x 12

broad jump x 2, sand-bag push x 2

DB front raise x 12, wall sit DB lateral x 12

Equalizer pull up x 12, bent over row x 12

band curl x 24, bench dip x 12

plank

up & over step box x 15, banded donkey kicks x 12

DB pull over x 12, DB press x 12

plyo lunge x 12, BB side lunge x 12

DB iron cross x 12, DB see saw x 12

TRX wide row x 12, TRX narrow row x 12

BB 21’s, DB skull crusher x 12

plank

vertical jump x 5, TRX leg curl x 12

wiper x 24, narrow push up x 24

lunge 5 front+5 back+5 pulse x 5, skater x 12

1 arm KB snatch x 10, BB military press x 12

KB row x 12, rev DB fly x 12

KB curl x 12, KB ext x 12

plank

Happy Lifting!