Body Blast: Push & Pull

Cathe Friedrich
Year Released: 2003

Categories: Balance/Medicine/Mini/Stability Ball, Total Body Workouts


This workout is part of Cathe’s Body Blast series and is available by itself on VHS or on a dvd bundled with the Supersets workout. The dvd is very well-chaptered and features numerous pre-mix options.

The workout is about 45 minutes long and works the body parts in pairs. You begin with a short warm-up, then do sets of two exercises each, one for each body part in the pair. You do two lower body sets, two for chest/back, two for shoulders/back and two for biceps/triceps (although unlike the other pairs, you do all the biceps work together and all the triceps work together). Then you move to the floor and do one set of two exercises for inner/outer thigh, one set for core/abs and one for calves/tibialis.

The workout felt very complete to me. I did not feel like it over-worked the lower body, and it is great to have a total-body workout I enjoy that has floor work in it. The ab work was a little skimpy (I did my own thing during that section) but in spite of Cathe’s impressive use of words like “anterior” and “lateral” and such, I am not fully convinced the back needs quite this much attention. (Interesting too that in Supersets, on this same dvd, she seems to include an overabundance of shoulder work). I thought the calf work was a little on the long side, but I was pleasantly surprised at the tibialis exercise which I have never seen.

I am not a Cathe groupie who has every single tape of hers, and of the workouts I do have, they are all strength tapes. This workout is more accessible than some of Cathe’s killer 3-day splits like Slow & Heavy or Pure Strength, and is less equipment-fussy than Supersets---I used only two sets of weights and the step was only needed for one exercise. I don’t do back work on the ball so I would up using mine mostly to sit on for the shoulder work. The one thing I wouldn’t think you could modify would be the tibialis move at the end, but other than that it could all be done ball-free.

Joanna

01/06/2004