Ripped with HiiT: Lift It Hit It - Chest, Shoulders, Triceps

This is one of the heavy upper-body weights workouts in Cathe's Ripped With HiiT series. The strength section is 35 minutes long, and Cathe uses dumbbells, a barbell and a Club step used as a weights bench. If you don't have a barbell, all the exercises could be done with dumbbells. Cathe and her four backgrounders - Jai, Amanda, Brenda and Al - are in the well-lit gym studio. Music is for background/ambience and is inoffensive, unmemorable noise; except for the warmup, Cathe isn't on the beat anyway.

After a brief warmup, Cathe leads you through exercises for chest, shoulders and triceps. The basic format is one exercise, 3 sets of 10-12 reps lifting heavy, then one set of a light-weight or body-weight "finisher" exercise of 15-20 reps. The heavy sets have 20-30 seconds of rest between sets, and Cathe encourages you to lift heavy enough that you're hitting failure at some point during the second and third sets. A very short stretch, just under two minutes, completes the workout.

In order the exercises are:

For chest:

Dumbbell bench press, 3 sets of 12 reps

Pushups finisher, 1 set of 15 reps

Incline bench press, 3 sets of 12

Triceps pushups finisher, 1 set of 15

Incline fly, 3 sets of 12

Decline pushups, 1 set of 15

For shoulders:

Super set of barbell overhead press followed by upright row, 3 sets of 10

'Scarecrow' finisher, 1 set of 20 (hold arms straight out to sides at shoulder level, bend elbows to 90 degrees so palms are facing out and your arms are in a goalpost position; now rotate so palms face the floor, then bring them back up to goalpost)

Super set of alternating lateral raise and front raise, 3 sets of 10

External rotation lateral raises finisher, one set of 15

For triceps:

Dumbbell overhead extensions, 3 sets of 12

Dips finisher, 2 sets of 20

Barbell skullcrushers, 3 sets of 12

Kickbacks finisher, 1 set of 20

Although this workout is still a little too fast-paced to be a great strength-building workout - Cathe seems incapable of taking a long-enough rest period to transition most of her weights workout out of the endurance category** - you can go heavy with this workout. I just press pause and take a little more time between sets. You might have to anyway, since the setup time between exercises isn't always enough to get your bench in the right position and your barbell adjusted.

**with the exception of Slow & Heavy