Flex Train

Cathe‘s new workouts finally arrived! Flex Train is a total body strength workout. It is high rep/low weight. I really, really like this workout; however I would put it at intermediate level, which is a little unusual for Cathe who usually does advanced level workouts. I do add a caveat to this. It is intermediate for me if I use the same dumbbells as Cathe. Any time I get a new Cathe workout, I use the same weight as she does the first time I do the workout and make notes on whether the weight worked for me or if I need to go heavier (or even lighter sometimes) the next time I do it. In this case, almost every exercise got an “up” arrow to go heavier next time. In addition, any exercise that had more than one set, I lifted heavier on the second set and that did the trick–it kicked up the intensity level. So I’m sure the next time I do this workout with heavier weights, it will seem much more advanced to me. ***UPDATED 10/21/13: I did this workout again using heavier weights this time for all of the exercises and that did the trick! It definitely felt much more advanced. And I still loved it! Might be one of my favorite workouts!***

I liked a lot about this workout. First, I like total body strength workouts. It had good music, it hit each muscle group adequately, though some harder than others, but each muscle group got worked nicely. And it moved at a nice clip so that you get a bit of cardio, too. The warm up, in fact, made me think it would be more metabolic than it turned out to be. During the warm up you are doing some moves that are in the main workout portion of both Supercuts and All Out Low Impact HIIT: squat kick squat lunge combos. Plus you also do push up/bear crawl combos in the warm up. So it was a nice little warm up–definitely got you ready for the workout to come.

I also like the editing done in Cathe’s newer workouts (Crossfire/To The Max, all Xtrain workouts and these). She uses the bottom half of the screen to sometimes alert you to changes in the workout. In this workout it alerts you when moving to a different muscle group or tells you the weights she is using.

Flex Train is 57 minutes long; 7 minute warm up, 45 minute training time and 5 minute stretch.  Equipment needed: dumbbells, Slide N Glide disks, dynaband, firewalker and a mat. Listed after each exercise is the weight that Cathe uses for that exercise.