You don’t need a gym membership to build lower-body strength—try doing this at-home dumbbell workout instead

Woman doing dumbbell workout at home in living room.

There's no need to overcomplicate strength workouts. Even if you don’t have a gym membership, you can still get started with resistance training.

With nothing more than a pair of dumbbells, you can build strength across the whole body and develop functional fitness. Trainers Juice & Toya recently shared a workout that targets your legs and core in 30 minutes.

While Juice sticks to one heavy dumbbell in the workout, Toya has a medium and lightweight option. You might want to replicate this approach, using different weights to match the difficulty of the exercises. If you are working out from home and don't have access to lots of weights, invest in a pair of adjustable dumbbells so you can modify your load accordingly.

How to do Juice and Toya's core and lower-body workout

Follow Juice and Toya in the YouTube video above as they demonstrate the movements. It's an interval-style workout, which means you'll complete 45 seconds of exercise, followed by 15 seconds of rest.

Benefits of this workout

This is an example of HIRT, which stands for high-intensity resistance training. It’s similar to HIIT (high-intensity interval training) but it has a bigger emphasis on strength-boosting exercises. Popular with muscle-clad superstars like Chris Hemsworth, it offers many benefits.

Like HIIT, HIRT is a demanding and high-energy workout, so it increases your heart rate and boosts your cardio fitness. It can also improve your muscular endurance (your muscles’ ability to work for longer periods) and can increase your muscle mass when done regularly. The main benefit is it’s a time-efficient way to train—you can target muscles across your whole body in 30 minutes or less.

This workout also contains lots of compound movements, which engage multiple different muscle groups at once. Some examples of compound movements are suitcase deadlifts, front squats and lunges. All of these exercises are great for building full-body and core strength as well as targeting the lower-body muscles. Plus, they work your joints through a range of motion, boosting your mobility.