Saundra

Plyo HiiT One is 27 minutes in length.  After a 5 minute warm up, Cathe leads you through a series of 14 exercise combinations before taking you into a 4 minute stretch. The workout builds as you move through. Cathe adjust the rest period depending on the exercise. You are doing at least two rounds of each exercise before you move to the next exercise. Too many power 7s is how I characterize Plyo HiiT Two .  It seemed as if every third exercise we were doing power 7s. This workout uses the step and a dumbbell and it is also 27 minutes. There are 13 exercises in between the warm up and cool down. Expect impact and lots of jumping. Each workout features its own introduction.  Each workout has 7 premixes associated with it. Plyo HiiT One - 3 & 1/2 stars Plyo HiiT Two - 3 & 1/4 stars

Lift It HiiT It Legs is a 40 minute lower body focused workout. Cathe combines strength with cardio.   Each set starts with a heavy weight leg exercise and then this is followed by an explosive cardio exercise.  The cardio exercise mimics the strength exercise. I really like this workout. There are 24 exercises and I thought the combination of strength and cardio exercises complimented each other and flowed really well until we got to the Woodchop Side lunge exercise. This exercise seemed out of place to me in this workout. This was your strength exercise but the tempo was fast.  The following cardio exercise was  Weighted Explosive Side Lunges.  It felt as if there were two cardio exercises back to back instead of a strength and cardio. The workout got back on track with the remaining exercises.  There are eight premixes in the workout - ranging from 22 minutes to 53 minutes. The only equipment used are dumbbells. 4 stars

Lift It Hit It Chest, Triceps & Shoulders clocks in at 39 and 1/2 minutes. In between the warm up and cool down, Cathe works the chest, shoulders and then the triceps. This workout followed the same pattern as the Back, Biceps and Shoulders workout. You will do a heavy weight exercise for three sets and then follow with a finisher exercise. For the chest portion of the workout, the finisher exercise are push ups.  So you are doing three sets of push ups because there are three heavy weight chest exercises. I thought the tempo of the shoulder exercise was way too fast. It seemed as if Cathe was speeding through the exercises in this segment.  It felt more endurance like than strength based. For the shoulders, there are two super sets and each super set is followed by a finisher. Triceps follow the shoulders.  There are four exercises, two heavy sets and 2 finishers. I felt this workout the next day.  If fact I am still feeling it. I did this workout...

Clocking in at over 52 minutes Lift It Hit It Back, Biceps & Shoulders is the longest workout in the Ripped With HiiT workout series by Cathe. This workout starts of with a brief warm up.  After the warm up Cathe does  six exercises for the back.  This is followed by four exercise for the rear shoulders.  After shoulder work, there are six exercises for the biceps.  A stretch concludes the workout. In each of the segments, Cathe stars with a heavy weight exercise - usually twelve reps for three sets. She immediately follows this with a "finisher" exercise which uses lighter weight but higher reps. Dumbbells, a barbell, band, mat and step are used in this workout.  The step is only used as a bench. There are 11 premixes on this DVD ranging in time from 19:46 to 63:34. This was a nice workout. 3 & 1/2 stars

HiiT Circuit Lower Body is part of Cathe's Ripped with HiiT series.  This workout is just under 47 minutes in length and uses a step and heavy dumbbells and a barbell to get the job done. This workout alternates high intensity cardio training with high intensity weight sculpting for the legs.  The pattern varies slightly in that sometimes you might do two cardio exercises and then two weight exercises or one cardio move followed by one strength move. Throughout the workout, Cathe varies the tempo, rhythm, and rep count. The workout flows well but a lot of the exercises are very familiar. If you do a lot of Cathe workouts you will be able to just jump right in to this one. The music is a fast paced up beat tempo, but you are not necessarily working out to the music. There are 8 premixes included on this DVD. The workout includes subtitles that pop up and tell you which weight Cathe is using. This was a decent lower body workout. 3 & 1/2 stars

Ripped With HiiT is Cathe latest workout series.  The series contains a total of 9 workouts plus two bonus ab workouts.  The concept with this series is that Cathe is combining heavy weights with high intensity interval training. HiiT Circuit Upper Body is the first workout I did in the series.  It clocks in at just over 46 minutes.  While the title of the workout is HiiT Circuit Upper Body, I felt that  it was more total body focus than just upper body as most of the upper body exercises incorporated legs. There are 8 rounds.  Each round features a compound upper lower body exercise and a high impact cardio blast.  There are some isolation upper body exercises included as well. There are 8 premixes of various length. The DVD is very well chapter. The music is decent. Sometimes you are working to the beat of the music and at other times you are not. The set is a nighttime setting of a metropolitan city. I like HiiT Circuit Upper Body. 4 ...