My Basement Gym

Since I liked the Beginner Weights workout I tried last week pretty well, I decided to try another weights workout from Discount Workouts today. I’m pretty much over my cold, so I went with Advanced Weight Training Vol 2, Workout One. This is a 60 minute full body workout, including warm up, abs, and stretch. The workout is led by Ashley, an instructor that I haven’t seen before – but I liked her a lot. She’s friendly, encouraging, engaging, and cues well. She offers a lot of form pointers throughout, as well as good visuals for many of the exercises. She also does a great job of telling you which exercise in next, so I usually knew what weight to choose and never had to pause the dvd, or play catch up. The overall pace was very good. Ashley also did an excellent job with letting you know how many reps or how much time is left for the exercises, and always encouraged you to keep pushing and finish out the set. Her timing was fantastic for that. Just about every time I was really feeling the burn and wondering how many reps were left, Ashley would tell me.

Each muscle group is worked for about five minutes. The workout is chaptered every ten minutes, but since the warm up is longer than five minutes, the chapters don’t really match up with the muscle groups. But, that’s not a big deal to me. Ashley uses a barbell for most of the workout, and uses weight plates for a few of the exercises, too. I used dumbbells in place of the plates, and also used dumbbells for the biceps and triceps work. A bench or step is also used for the chest and triceps work. I enjoyed the Olympic style clean and press, and my heart rate really got elevated toward the end of that segment, as she alternates fast paced clean and presses with deadlifts and dead rows. Ashley uses various rep counts like 2-2, 3-1, 1-1, 1-3, etc – as well as pulsing and bottom end and top end reps to increase the intensity, similar to Workout One from Beginner Weights. I also found the weighted abs work to be challenging, and ended up changing the move at the end from full sit ups to crunches toward the end of the set, heh.

Overall, I thought this workout was really good! The music was fun – it has dancey, techno flavor with a good beat that matched the rep speeds well. And I liked that the music stayed high energy to the end – even for the stretch. This reminded me a lot of Get Ripped, which is one of my favorite Jari Love workouts. I’m looking forward to trying Workout Two later this week!

The breakdown:

Minutes 0-10:

• Warm up with a light barbell – deadlifts, upright row, squats, biceps curls, etc for ~6 min
• Barbell squats

Minutes 10-20:

• Barbell squats
• Barbell chest press
• Dumbbell flye
• Deadlifts
• Dead row
• Clean and press

Minutes 20-30:

• Clean and press, dead row, deadlift combo
• Barbell lying triceps extension
• Barbell triceps press
• Barbell biceps curl

Minutes 30-40:

• Barbell biceps curl
• Barbell stationary lunges (~6 min)
• Barbell overhead press
• Barbell upright row

Minutes 40-50:

• Barbell upright row
• Barbell overhead press
• Dumbbell bent arm lateral raise
• Crunches (begin around minute 44)
• Oblique crunches
• Reverse crunches
• Full sit ups, while exchanging or tapping a light weight to each hand, across the body

Minutes 50-60:

• Full sit up, with a weighted twist to each side at the top of the sit up
• Stretch (begins around minute 52)