Michelle Dozois Peak Fit Challenge Pure Strength 1

Pure Strength 1 clocks in at around 50 minutes. It consist of a warm up, 8 cycles or rounds and a cool down.

Each round including the warm up and cool down are about 5 minutes each. Michelle uses light weight during the warm up and the warm up includes several of the exercises you will see in later rounds.

Each round focuses on a particular body part or muscle group. At the end of each muscle group, Michelle includes a total body exercise to round out the 5 minutes. As with the Fit Test and all the workouts in this series, bells go off letting you know when the round is almost finish.

The flow of the workout (the core part) goes like this: back, chest, back, chest, legs, arms/shoulders, legs and arms/shoulders. Now while Michelle is essentially performing the exact same exercise from one set to the next, she does vary the tempo and rep count. Also each plank pushup combination is different.

Dumbbells (light and heavy) are used as well as the a band This band comes with the Peak Fit System. Frankly I don't like the band. I used the band for the first set of each exercise but for the second set I switch to dumbbells. The band has almost no elasticity and on many of the exercises I didn't feel as if I was executing the exercises properly using it.

The exercises where I felt the band was a good fit was during the squat lunge combo exercise in the Leg cycle and during the squat band overhead press side to side in the arms/shoulder cycle.

What I like most about this workout is the flow. The exercises move from one to another and the exercises are not overly complicated. Before I could look up and check the time, the workout was ending.
What I like least - the band.

Michelle does do most of the workout. I think only once maybe twice she stopped working out and starting coaching.

3 1/2 stars