OK, you have about 40 minutes to devote to the weight training on 3 non-consecutive days.
You've had success with 30 day shred which, correct me if I'm wrong, is cirucit training.
You are going to be doing your HIIT in the same gym session.
You are basically open to all exericse options but prefer to stay off machines (good decision).
Based on that, I like a 3 day full-body, circuit workout. Because you will be doing high intensity cardio in the same session, I wouldn't burn you out doing too high intensity on the lifting, so I would use an 10-12 rep range.
I would do a 5 exercise circuit consisting of:
1. A Lower Body Exercise
2. An Upper Body Push
3. A Single Leg Lower Body Exercise
4. An upper Body Pull
5. An exercise for your abdominals, lower back, or hips
Try to do all exercises standing to challenge as many stabilizing muscles as possible. I would try to include one cable exercise in each circuit as well for the same reason.
Do 3 circuits. Take whatever rest you need between circuits and if you need to take brief rests between exercises do so and don't beat yourself up over it. If the workout runs too long, you can drop the core exercises if you are doing a lot of cable and single leg work along with the fullbody movements like deadlifts and squats, you will still build a strong and stable core without them.
Some exercise options:
Lower Body
Pull-throughs
Cable Squat Pulls
Goblet Squat
Back Squat
Front Squat
Deadlift
Romanian Deadlift
Single Leg
All different lunge variations
Step Ups
1 leg swiss ball leg curls
Depending on stability, some single leg deadlift and/or squat variations as well.
Upper Body Push
Standing Cable Chest Press
Alternating DB Press
Bench Press
Alternating DB Incline Press
Dips (assisted if needed)
Upper Body Pull
All chinup and pushup variations (assisted if needed)
various grip lat pulldowns (double and single handed)
Standing Cable Rows
T-Bar Rows
DB Rows
Core
Planks
Supine Bridges
Rollouts
Standing Ab Crunches
Prone Plate Switces
Pallof Press
Woodchoppers (all variations)
Just some thoughts and suggestions. The possible menu of exercises is of course larger.
You can build as many workouts you like and change them as often as you like. My prefrence, however, would be to build three different workouts, use them for 4 weeks, and then build three more workouts and use them for the remainder of the time period you stated.
Progress in weights whenever you can complete all reps of the exercise at the top of the rep range used.
Last edited by Depalma; 03-03-2009 at 10:23 AM.
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