40MIN Upper Body Strength // Day 12 HR12WEEK 5.0

40 Min Upper Body Strength is Day 12 in Heather Robertson‘s HR12Week 5.0 program.

This is an excellent and thorough upper body strength workout. Heather hits every upper body muscle group and if you use challenging weights, your upper body will be well worked in a short amount of time. She had a sort of dynamic puppy pose in the warm up that felt so good–I wanted to hold it but its the warm up, so no holding. Thankfully she revisited puppy pose along with some variations in the stretch at the end so I finally got to hold that feel good stretch.

This is a circuit based workout. There are 4 circuits and each circuit is done twice. The exercises are done interval style: 40 seconds of work followed by 20 seconds of recovery. There is a timer in the lower right hand corner of the screen counting down your intervals and recoveries. During the recoveries Heather previews the next exercise. At the bottom of the screen during the preview, there is a small graphic with a weight recommendation–light, medium or heavy.

40 Min Upper Body Strength is 42:47 minutes; 40 second intro, 4:40 minute warm up and 4 minute stretch. Equipment: dumbbells and an exercise mat. Heather recommends light to heavy dumbbells (5-30 pounds). The weights listed below are what I used.

Circuit 1:

1. Single dumbbell row (landmine row, hinge forward at hips so back is flat, hold one heavy DB in both hands, row DB to chest) (one 60# DB)
2. Pullover (lay on back, legs raised and knees bent at 90 degrees, legs hold this position while upper body does pullover) (one 40# DB)
3. Skullcrushers (15# DBs)
4. Superman
5. Repeat# 1-4

30 second rest

Circuit 2:

1. Single arm lateral raise (one 10# DB)
2. Repeat #1 on other arm
3. Alternating straight arm front raise (10# DBs)
4. Arnold press (20# DBs)
5. Repeat #1-4

30 second rest

Circuit 3:

1. Lay down push up (alternate one push up with one superman)
2. Single arm chest press (one 30# DB)
3. Repeat #2 on other arm
4. Slo mo chest press (both arms) (25# DBs)
5. Repeat #1-4

Circuit 4:

1. Overhead tricep extension (French press) (one 30# DB first set, one 25# DB second set)
2. Alternating bent over rear delt fly (10# DBs)
3. Alternating hammer curls (20# DBs)
4. Bicep burn out (fast alternating bicep curls w/ light DBs) (5# DBs)
5. Repeat #1-4

For more info on Heather Robertson’s workouts and other (free) streaming workouts I’ve sampled and reviewed, check out my Streaming page.