While fast and frenetic HIIT workouts full of jumping exercises like burpees are certainly one effective option for building strength and fitness, they don’t work for everyone; for many people, high-impact moves can be uncomfortable.
You can also build strength effectively with low-impact workouts, like this 20-minute session from YouTube fitness duo Mr and Mrs Muscle, which uses standing exercises with dumbbells to train the whole body.
The workout is led by Viv Addo, who is using two sets of dumbbells for the session — a lighter 11lb set and a 22lb set.
This is just a guideline, though, so use whatever weights you have available that provide a challenge for each exercise while allowing you to maintain good form. If you have a set of the best adjustable dumbbells, then you can change the weight between moves to suit each one.
Watch MrandMrsMuscle’s 20-minute dumbbell workout
This is a low-impact workout, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s going to be an easy one. You’ll be challenging muscles all over the body with long sets of weighted exercises, building strength and raising your heart rate.
After a quick warm-up, you go into two rounds of eight moves, working for 45 seconds with each exercise, then resting for 15 seconds. You do some of the moves on both sides, and have a longer break between rounds to grab a drink of water.
The moves are a mix of compound and isolation exercises that target the whole body, starting with heavier lifts like squats and deadlifts to work the legs and glutes, moving to upper-body moves and standing abs exercises.
It’s a well-rounded session that people of all fitness levels can benefit from, and the fact that you do two rounds of the moves means you can get used to the technique first time around, then try to push to do more reps in the second round.
Addo does the workout with you to provide the perfect example of what your form should look like with each move, and there’s lots of other handy info on screen as well, like a timer and a body map showing which muscles are being worked by the exercise you’re doing.
It’s a simple workout to scale to your ability as well. If you’re finding some moves too tough, pick a lighter dumbbell, or do the exercise without any weight; you can also reduce the work interval to 30 seconds and rest for longer between moves.
Conversely, if you’re looking to progress the session, you just need to increase the weight you’re using, or work faster to fit in more reps — just make sure your form doesn’t suffer as a result.
You can also progress by moving on to another workout once you’re comfortable with this session. This eight-move dumbbell workout takes around 25 minutes and works the whole body, while this standing ab workout focuses on sculpting your core in six moves.
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