Training consistently is the key to long-term fitness. If you can move regularly throughout the week, even if you’re just doing short workouts each day or every other day, it’s of great benefit to the body and better than powering through one long and hard workout then doing nothing for a couple of weeks.
Fortunately, there are some routines where all you need is a set of adjustable dumbbells or even just your body weight, like this 10-minute workout from YouTube fitness trainer duo Juice & Toya that's one you can do every day, and it’s designed to rule out any excuses.
It’s also a low-impact standing workout that doesn’t contain any jumping exercises or moves you have to do on the floor, so you can do it anywhere and if you’re worried about pressure on your joints that can arise from jumping around. If you're after a quick and simple way to work the whole body, it’s a great option.
Watch Juice & Toya’s 10-minute full body workout
The workout is made up of 10 exercises and you do each for 50 seconds before taking a 10 second rest and moving onto the next move. The exercises have been selected to target your upper and lower body, along with your core, with some being combination moves like the squat and clean.
Throughout the workout Juice uses a pair of dumbbells for his versions of each exercise, while Toya does them as bodyweight-only moves. They recommend using lighter weights when you first try the workout — Juice is using 10lb dumbbells in the video. Each upcoming exercise is demonstrated on screen during the 10 second rest, so you know what’s coming next.
I gave the workout a try on one time-starved day, here are my takeaways.
You don’t have to match Juice & Toya’s speed
The workout video is set to music and Juice & Toya are both doing their reps at a steady rhythm, and it's natural to try and copy their movements. I was also keen to push to do as many reps as possible in each work period since it is a short workout, so I started out rushing each move.
This is a mistake, because all I did was mess up the form and even lose my balance at times, which actually made each work period a little less effective than if I had just taken my time. Once I had the form down for each move I found it easier to not watch Juice & Toya so I didn’t naturally try to match their pace.
Standing makes it easier to do the workout
Knowing I was going to be standing for the whole workout did make deciding to do the session a lot easier. I didn’t have to roll out a yoga mat or worry about positioning my laptop so I could see the video while getting up and down.
I just hit play, took a step back and got straight into it. It does remove a small barrier to working out, and that’s always a good thing.
Having a variety of weights would be useful
If you opt for the dumbbell version of the workout, as I did, having a couple of different weights would be handy, or even adjustable dumbbells, like the NordicTrack Select-A-Weight dumbbells, you can change the load on quickly.
For some moves you are primarily using your leg muscles to lift the weight and can use a heavy dumbbell, but then there are curls and overhead press exercises where I needed to use a light weight.
If you only use one, I’d go for a light one for sure, mainly because of the curl and punch exercises in the middle of the workout which I found hard to do with a 27lb dumbbell, which is all I had.
I did also have a kettlebell available and quickly swapped to this for the swings exercise in the workout, because it’s a move I prefer to do with a kettlebell over dumbbells.
zIt’s another move where you can use a heavy weight, so if you can use light dumbbells for the most part but have a heavier kettlebell nearby, that would help you get the most from the workout.
The unweighted version is best for beginners
Having the two different exercise options on screen throughout the workout is great and the unweighted moves Toya demonstrates will be ideal for beginners, as well as being a good fall back options for more experienced people who might find they get too tired to carry on using dumbbells halfway through the work period.
However, if you don’t use weights it’s not the most challenging workout and you might find you need to progress the sessions quickly to keep pushing yourself and building fitness.
You can do this either by introducing weights next time or doing another round for a 20-minute workout. If you only have 10 minutes each day, you could also do 10 minute workouts that focus on different parts of the body to target different muscles each day, like this 10-minute core workout or 10-minute arms workout.
