20 Minute Dumbbell Back and Biceps Workout at Home is one of Caroline Girvan‘s short non-EPIC workouts. I’ve been wanting to try it for a while and finally got to it this morning. It is a great add on/finisher workout to get some additional back work. There is only one bicep exercise in the entire workout but you are using your biceps for all of the back exercises, so biceps are being worked throughout. I did two of Caroline’s workouts back to back this morning and I started with this one. Coming to it fresh, I felt like I could have lifted heavier on all of the exercises except the renegade rows and preacher curls. So this would be a nice workout to use to measure strength. When I do this workout again I will increase my weights on the rest of the exercises. **I returned to it this morning, using this workout as a finisher, and I was able to increase the weight on some of the exercises (updated in breakdown below). It did an excellent job of finishing me off!**
Each exercise is done for 30 seconds followed by 30 seconds of recovery, unless the exercise is done on one arm. Then you do both arms for 30 seconds each before you get a 30 second recovery. Except for the final exercise–single arm preacher curls. You just keep alternating arms for the full 3 minutes that you do that exercise with no recovery. However your non-working arm is resting while the other arm is working. There is a timer in the upper right hand side of the screen counting down your intervals and another timer appears in the center of the screen during the recoveries. Caroline describes each exercise you will be doing and gives form pointers during the intro.
20 Minute Dumbbell Back and Biceps Workout at Home is 23:11 minutes; 3:10 minute intro, no warm up or stretch. Equipment: dumbbells, a fitness mat, yoga block and a chair or bench for bent over rows and preacher curls. Caroline is using 15kg/33 pound dumbbells and 8kg/17.6 pound dumbbells. The weights listed below are what I used. I used my weight bench for the bent over rows and the pullovers, and I used my stability ball for the preacher curls.
- Single arm bent over row (one 40# DB)
- Repeat #1 on other arm
- 30 second rest
- Repeat #1-3 two more times
- Single arm renegade row (yoga block is under non-working hand) (one 25# DB)
- Repeat #4 on other arm
- 30 second rest
- Repeat 5-7 two more times
- Pullovers (one 35# DB)
- 30 second rest
- Repeat #9 & 10 two more times
- Supine single arm row (bent over row with palm facing forward) (one 35# DB)
- Repeat #12 on other arm
- 30 second rest
- Repeat #12-14 two more times
- Single arm preacher curls (one 15# DB)
- Repeat #16 on other arm
- Repeat #16 & 17 two more times
For more info on Caroline Girvan’s workouts and other (free) streaming workouts I’ve sampled and reviewed, check out my Streaming page.
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