Jessica Alba is no stranger to training hard, recently giving Instagram fans a sneak peek into her fully-stocked home gym by sharing one of the rigorous workouts.
But most of us (celebs aside) don’t have a gym’s worth of equipment in our house. So I set Trainer Academy expert Domenic Angelino a challenge: Design an Alba-inspired dumbbell workout for Fit&Well readers to try at home.
Like Alba’s session, his workout focuses on strengthening your shoulders and back, but it uses minimal equipment. It also includes plenty of core stability work, which Angelino says is a consistent feature of the Fantastic Four star’s training.
The Jessica Alba workout
1. Warm-up
(Image credit: Getty / Vgajic)
Get your blood pumping with a brisk walk. This can be done on a treadmill or outside. Immediately after the walk, run at a slow, comfortable pace for two-and-a-half minutes.
You may also want to take a look at some of the dynamic stretches in our warm-up feature to prime your muscles for the moves ahead.
2. Dumbbell Pendlay row
Sets: 3 Reps: 8 Rest: 60 seconds
- Stand upright with your feet slightly beyond than shoulder-width apart and two dumbbells on the floor in front of you. Hinge at the hips to bend over and grasp them.
- Keeping your back flat, powerfully row both dumbbells up to the bottom of your rib cage, then control them back to the floor.
Trainer’s insight
Alba performs a cable machine back-strengthening exercise while sitting on a bosu ball. Angelino says the Pendlay row is the exercise that will “most closely replicate this movement pattern and its training effect”.
If you cannot reach the dumbbells on the ground while keeping a straight back, you can swap this move for bent-over rows or place the dumbbells on a raised surface in front of you like a step.
3. Seated dumbbell overhead press
Sets: 3 Reps: 8 Rest: 60 seconds
- Sit on a chair with a dumbbell in each hand, held at your shoulders.
- Brace your core and press the dumbbells upwards until your…
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