Bikini HIIT is a fun little 20 minute workout from Popsugar, led by Anna Renderer. I really liked this workout a lot. It was an excellent finisher to the total body strength workout I had just completed. However, what bothers me to no end is the liberal use of the acronym “HIIT” by trainers. This is not a HIIT workout. It is set up in intervals: each exercise is done for 40 seconds with a 20 second recovery. But that does not automatically equal a HIIT!!! The “high intensity” aspect of the acronym also has to come into play for it to be an actual HIIT and that isn’t present in this workout. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is an effective little 20 minute workout that I thoroughly enjoyed. It is a bodyweight strength conditioning workout that is intense enough to give you some cardio–just not HIIT level cardio.
Bikini HIIT workout is 20 minutes long with no warm up or cool down/stretch, though Anna does tell you at the very end (when the clock has already zeroed out) to stretch your quads (and she is doing a standing quad stretch as she says this). So you are getting a full 20 minutes of work. Each exercise is done for 40 seconds w/ a 20 second recovery. Anna gives you a circuit of 5 exercises; you repeat this circuit 4 times. So each circuit takes approx. 5 minutes.
- Plank and knee tuck walk (start in plank and walk feet in then back out to plank)
- Push up to down dog combo
- Squat w/ low hop (squat and stay there isometrically while you hop)
- V sit crunch w/ Russian twist combo (start lying on the mat; come up into V sit and do a Russian twist; Anna will cue you on how many Russian twists to do (2 or 4 or 10 or 14) then you lay back down and come back up to V sit and do however many Russian twists Anna tells you to do–you do this for 40 seconds)
- Gate swing hops (do gate swing (jump in and out of deep plié squat), but hop forward and back with each one)
For more info on Popsugar and other (free) streaming workouts I’ve sampled and reviewed, check out my Streaming page.
