A great and challenging workout that can be done with minimal equipment is what I call the “Olympic Bar Workout”. All you need is either a barbell (if you are a teenager, a female, or anyone new to weightlifting) or an Olympic bar. An Olympic bar is the bar that you commonly see on a bench press or squat rack and it weighs 45 pounds. If the Olympic bar is a little heavy for you, grab a 20 or 30 pound barbell (not dumbbell!) and use that until you can complete the workout with the true Olympic bar. From the Olympic bar, you can add plates onto each side once you improve.
The workout is as follows:
*20 deadlifts
*20 squats
*20 Split Lunges
*20 upright rows
*20 shoulder presses
It doesn’t seem too challenging, but the goal is to complete these 100 repetitions as quickly as possible, but remembering to have a controlled motion with every rep.
Go through each of these 5 exercises, 3 times to start, working your way up to 5 full circuits. Keep track of your times and see if you can repeat each circuit within a fairly close time of one another. As for rest time, aim for 60-90 seconds in between each full circuit.
The reason why this workout is so effective is because the smaller muscle groups often act as synergists or assisting muscles for the larger muscle groups during certain exercises. Therefore, if the smaller muscles get fatigued first, when you perform the exercises for the larger muscle groups later in the workout, those exercises are likely to be less effective. So in this workout we concentrate on the bigger muscle groups of the body. They also tend to burn more calories and are good for increasing your heart rate.
