The program is 8 weeks long and has you working out 4 days a week. It also includes two optional recovery workouts, a foam rolling routine and a stretching routine that each lasts about 10 minutes that you can do on the off days. Each workout has you lifting and/or doing cardio. During the first six weeks of the program, you work out for two days (doing chest and triceps and then back and biceps), then you get a rest day, then you do shoulders, and finish out the week with legs. The lifting workouts generally fall into one of three categories, a 50/50 workout in which you do half lifting and half cardio, a circuit workout in which you just lift, but do four exercises in each block with no rest in between them, or a circuit workout in which you do two lifting exercies followed by a 30 second HIIT exercise. Every other week, the leg workout is a leg-focused HIIT workout (so no lifting). Each workout ends with three sets of core in which you alternate between two or three core-focused exercises.
The final two weeks are "shred weeks" in which you switch up the exercise combinations (Chest and Back, Legs, rest day, Shoulders and Arms, and Full Body HIIT). The Full Body HIIT workouts consist of three rounds, each with two exercises, then a bonus round in which you do all six exercises. In the first round, the duration of the exercise and the breaks are the longest and in the third round, they are the shortest. In the bonus round, you do each exercise for 30 seconds with no breaks in between them.
The idea behind the workouts is that you lift as heavy as you can, mostly doing just 10 reps of each exercise. You get very little rest between the exercises (about 15-20 seconds, max) and a little more rest between sets and blocks (30 seconds between sets and however long it takes Joel to explain what you are doing in the next block). Usually, the circuit workouts will include a burnout round in which you do two exercises back to back for 30 seconds. There are 10 cast members that appear throughout the workouts. Most of them are young (in their 20s or early 30s) and very fit. Some of them clearly have a fitness background. One of the female cast members is probably in her mid to late 30s and there is one older guy who is probably in his 50s who is fit but is the most "regular" looking of all the cast members. In each workout, only 4 cast members appear (until the last workout of the program) and one person is always a modifier for the HIIT and core moves. One plus is that the workouts are fairly short. The longest is 39 minutes and the shortest (not counting the two recovery routines) is about 28 minutes. So, it is an easy program to fit into most people's schedules. Even when you are modifying the workouts are tough. And, as you get in better shape the harder you can go so it is good regardless of your fitness level. You can tell that is the case because all of the cast members end up modifying at some point in the program, regardless of whether they are the designated modifier for that particular workout.
The one drawback to the program is that you will need dumbbells to do it. There are no band modifications like you get in some programs. And, you need a decent selection of weight as you will use light, medium, and heavy weights, whatever that is for you. The lightest weight I used was 3 pounds (for the shoulder exercise he calls swimmers) and the heaviest was 45 pounds (for the calf raises). This is definitely a workout in which you need to check your ego because, since there is so little rest between exercises and sets, you will very likely end up having to use lighter weights than you would doing the same exercises in a program like P90x where you get a lot of breaks (comparatively). The benefit to the minimal rest, however, is that even on the days when you are not doing any HIIT moves, you are still getting a cardio workout.
Overall, I would say it is a good program for a beginner who is in decent to good shape, but probably best for someone who is at an intermediate or advanced level. There are a handful of "before Lift 4" workouts that are shorter versions (each about 20 minutes long) of the regular workouts that you can do if you want to try pared-down versions of the workouts and see what it is like before committing to the full program.
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