Two dumbbells, five moves and 30 minutes to build strength and endurance

You don't need to go to the gym to build strength and muscle. With the right combination of bodyweight exercises you can get a great workout at home; add a couple of weights into the mix and your horizons expand even further. 

This dumbbell exercise routine, from fitness trainer James Stirling (aka the London Fitness Guy), is a five-move circuit which challenges you to complete each exercise for 40 seconds, followed by 20 seconds of rest. It targets a broad range of muscles across your whole body in just 30 minutes, so it’s a super-efficient session.

Watch the full sequence below, making a note of the correct form for each move, before plunging into the workout. 

Watch the London Fitness Guy's full-body workout

There's not a lot of downtime in this session. Stirling recommends you complete five rounds of the five different exercises, with no additional rest in between rounds. 

This style of workout is an example of high-intensity resistance training, or HIRT for short. It combines weighted resistance exercises with low rest times, so it's essentially a strength training session with some cardio thrown in. That means you'll be working your muscles and keeping your heart high at the same time. Very efficient.

Building muscle is an effective way to boost your metabolism, as muscle is a metabolically active tissue which requires more energy to maintain than fatty tissue. Simply put, this means you'll burn more calories at rest if you build more muscle.

Resistance training is only part of the puzzle when building muscle, however. You also need to fuel your body the right way, and a big part of this is consuming enough protein. 

Lifting weights causes tiny microtears in your muscle fibers, and protein contains the building blocks your body needs to repair these tears and make your muscles bigger and stronger than before. 

You can find protein in whole foods such as meat, fish, eggs, beans and pulses. If you need a little protein boost, the best protein powders for weight loss could also help, offering an extra 20g of protein per serving without any unwanted fat or sugars.