Editor’s note: This review has been updated to reflect BODi’s current subscription-based access — Body Beast is no longer sold as a standalone DVD set. Sagi Kalev is still the trainer and the program is still actively available on bodi.com, unlike some of the other older Beachbody titles.
In this Body Beast review, I’ll give you some insider info and tips about this unique 90-day workout program. You’ll learn what it is, how the workouts are structured, how the dieting plan works, what equipment is required, and my personal experience using it. This is my favorite Beachbody program, period.
If you’re interested in packing on 10, 20, or even 30 pounds of lean muscle in the next 3 months, you’ll want to pay close attention. If you love lifting weights but aren’t seeing results, your time is finally here. This is for women, beginners, and people who want to work out at home with weights.
Quick Facts
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What I Liked
- Gym-quality muscle-building results without leaving the house, in under 50 minutes
- Not a crazy endurance workout like T25 or Insanity Max:30 — a real weight training program anyone can do
- I use this every winter to get my strength routine in check before endurance training — it’s a genuinely good seasonal complement, not just a standalone program
- Real heart-rate-up intensity, even for a strength program — I’ve hit 150 bpm on the heart rate monitor, same range as a T25 or P90X3 session
What I Didn’t Like
- You need real equipment — a bench, a pull-up bar or bands, and a real dumbbell range
- If you’re a skinny hard gainer, the Bulk phase’s calorie targets take real meal-prep effort — plan the first week out carefully
- The first week brings real muscle soreness — normal, but be ready for it
How It Rates
Based on my own experience running the program, not a lab test.
The Body Beast Program
Body Beast is a 90 day workout program that is packed with pure science and laser focused routines to help you bulk up, get strong as heck, pack on pure muscle mass or get that ripped physique you always wanted! It seemed impossible until Beachbody teamed up with Sagi Kalev to make it happen.
Sagi is the guy who trains professional actors, bodybuilders, and models — when those people need a body transformation quick, they call him and pay thousands of dollars to get it done. He put everything into this program, packaged up so you can do it at home for a fraction of the price.
People call this the “New School” of bodybuilding. Remember the old Pumping Iron movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger — big-time meathead bodybuilders doing lots of repetitive sets, one body part at a time, with big weight, spending hours in the gym? Who has time for that. That approach still works. This is still valid today, but with a whole new twist and focus that takes less time, way more effective and gets the same results. Welcome to Body Beast – Dynamic Set Training secret!
What Is Body Beast, and Should You Buy It?
Body Beast is Beachbody’s answer to the people (mostly guys) who have been asking for a true at-home bodybuilding system. Body Beast is Beachbody’s answer to all the people (mostly guys) out there who have been asking for a true at-home bodybuilding system. Unlike most of their other products, which are focused on core strength training, cardio conditioning, and fat loss, the Body Beast workout is 100% focused on building quality muscle mass with little or no body fat increase. According to Sagi Kalev himself: “The purpose of Body Beast is to gain lean muscle mass, to also gain size and to gain confidence… It’s not focused on weight loss… The main thing about Body Beast is how to get bigger.”
Body Beast was originally launched back in 2012 but has seen a big increase in popularity and interest. Don’t let that date fool you — I use this program every year and never get disappointed.
If you work out regularly but aren’t seeing results, this is for you. If you’ve completed some other extreme fitness program and want to pack on more lean muscle, this is for you. If you just want to gain weight and muscle, or seriously want to increase your bench press, squat, or overall strength, this is for you. There’s a Lean schedule built in too, for anyone who wants to get ripped instead of bulking up.
Sagi Kalev, the Beast Creator
Before the release of Body Beast, Mr. Kalev was not very well known in the US fitness community. He was basically a fitness magazine model, personal trainer, and even did some acting in the 90’s. In his native country of Israel, however, Kalev is a fitness superstar. He has won the “Mr. Israel” bodybuilding competition twice and is considered to be one of the top bodybuilders to ever come out of the small country.
In recent years, Sagi has become a clinical nutritionist and functional medicine expert at the Thrive Institute in Dallas, Texas. The guy knows his stuff. His enthusiasm and expertise are definitely 2 of the biggest benefits of this program!
How Does Body Beast Work?
The program uses a special technique that is really a breakthrough in sport science. Sagi uses single sets, super sets, giant sets, progressive sets, forced sets, drop sets, tempo sets, and more to exhaust the muscles, engaging more active muscle fibers and boosting natural testosterone levels more than a typical home strength workout. I often run this program for 1-2 phases to get my strength in check before I start endurance training — it’s fun watching the strength and muscle gains at the end of each phase, and it works like clockwork.
A couple examples of what the sets look like:
Progressive Set: run through 15 reps light weight, 12 reps medium weight, 8 reps heavy weight, then a 90-second break, then do it backwards starting heavy and working back down to light. Pick your weights carefully — this one burns.
Forced Set: a first set of 4 regular reps with heavy weight, then on the 5th rep hold the weight down for 10 seconds, repeated 5 times for a total of 10 reps. It engages both fast and slow twitch muscles for maximum results — new science put to work with old-school exercises.
What Makes Body Beast Special
The biggest benefit, in my opinion, is that it gives you a gym-quality muscle-building workout at home. The biggest benefit, in my opinion, of this program is the fact that it allows anyone to get a gym-quality muscle building workout at home, without actually going to the gym. It utilizes several powerful techniques used by amateur and professional bodybuilders for decades. It also incorporates some innovative tactics developed by Sagi Kalev.
Progressive overload — steadily increasing the weight you lift day by day and week by week — is a foundation of the program. The other is a more advanced tactic called Dynamic Set Training. This involves the principle of pre-exhaustion, where you do several sets of an exercise with lighter weights and then hit your muscles hard with heavy “work sets” to cause the micro-damage necessary for rapid muscle growth. Pre-exhaustion is a powerful method that provides just enough stimulation to increase muscle size without going overboard with extremely heavy weights or very high sets / volume. Because rest periods are kept short in Body Beast you’ll be getting close to the “muscle failure” point in the last set or two, which is ideal for muscle growth.
Body Beast Block Schedule
Sagi divided the program into what he calls blocks. Each block has a focus to build muscle, bulk up and then go into beast mode to tone and lean up the muscle. So, basically you will follow the same set of workouts in each block rotating them every six days and then a day of rest. This means you will not be doing the exact same workout each day of the week which keeps it interesting. If you miss a day just stick to the schedule and move on. With these workouts you really cannot play catch up and do 2 workouts in one day.
Block 1 (Build) is the beginning of your body transformation — all about creating strength and definition in the first 30 days. Duration: 3 weeks, 6 days on, 1 day off. Total workouts: Chest & Triceps, Back & Biceps, Legs, Shoulders, Beast Cardio & Abs.
Block 2 (Bulk) is where the new science of bodybuilding develops power and lean muscle — you’re introduced to Multi-Sets, Combo Sets, Force Sets, and Progressive Sets (all explained in the course). Duration: 5 weeks, 6 days on, 1 day off. Total workouts: Back, Chest, Shoulders, Arms, Legs, Abs & Cardio.
Block 3 (Beast) puts on the finishing touches, using a rotation of all 12 workouts from the earlier blocks to really tone up and get lean. Duration: 4 weeks, 6 days on, 1 day off. You will do 6 per week but he does a great job of mixing up workouts from the build, bulk and beast blocks.
How Hard Are the Workouts?
Rest periods run 30-60 seconds between sets — a moderate pace, no rushing. I’ll be honest, I’m biased here because this is my favorite program. If you’ve lifted free weights before, you’ll love it — it goes back to the basics of pumping iron, twisted with some new methodology, and you can get awesome results in under 50 minutes. You don’t need to spend 2 hours in the gym to get results.
This is not a crazy endurance workout like T25 or Insanity Max:30 — it’s a weight training workout anyone can do. It could be challenging if you haven’t worked out in a while; that first week will bring muscle soreness, but you’ll adapt quickly and start rocking it by week 2 or 3. That’s normal for any new strength program.
I promise you though, that if you follow him along you will leave the workout dripping in sweat. I wore a heart rate monitor for a few sessions and hit the 150 range — same as a T25 or P90X3 workout. Surprising for a program built around lifting, not cardio.
The workouts are 30 to 50 minutes long, the ideal length for stimulating muscle growth without destroying too much muscle tissue via catabolism. There are “Build” workouts, which tend to be longer, and “Bulk” workouts, which tend to be shorter. There is also a “Total Body” workout and a “Beast Cardio” workout, both designed to burn fat as efficiently as possible without sacrificing muscle mass. Body Beast utilizes periodization, a proven bodybuilding strategy, and is split into 3 major parts: Build, Bulk, and Beast. The idea is to allow you to build “base” muscle and strength (Build), then force your body to rapidly increase in size (Bulk), then burn off any unwanted body fat to create the lean, muscular look most guys want (Beast).
The Meal Plan
The eating plan is based on proven bodybuilding dieting systems. Like the workouts, it is split into three distinct phases, designed for strength development, rapid muscle growth (“bulking”), and efficient fat loss (“cutting”). If you are a skinny hard gainer you will have to eat a lot of food / calories, especially during the “Bulk” phase. So much so that you may be more than a little shocked by the amount of time and effort you must spend preparing meals.
In the Beast manual you will walk through how to determine what calorie group you land in to get your daily calorie consumption. Based on that you will add or deduct calories to get lean and bulk up. From there you’ll know how many portions of protein, starches, legumes, veggies, fruits, and fats to eat each day, matched against a food list in the guide.
I landed in the 2,600-calorie range myself, and went with the Lean schedule — my daily goal was 7 starches, 3 legumes or protein liquids, 6 veggies or balanced liquids, 6 fruits or carb liquids, 12 proteins, and 6 fats. You will have to take time to plan this out the first week. Once you get the meals down you like I would stick with eating those frequently to make it easier on yourself. I also cook in bulk too so that I can freeze meals or put them in containers. It makes it really easy to put together meals to bring into work.
Equipment Needed
Since you’ll be doing real weightlifting, you’ll need to invest in some home equipment — not extreme, and most of it can be found relatively cheaply: a workout bench, a pull-up bar (a door-frame model is fine) or resistance bands, an EZ curl bar (optional but recommended), and adjustable dumbbells or a set of varying fixed weights. If cost is a concern, buy your weights ahead of time and keep an eye on local classifieds — there are almost always cheap dumbbells for sale from people moving or no longer using them.
How heavy you’ll need to go varies. I can throw around 90 lb dumbbells on my flat bench for 8-10 reps, but I found myself using 10-35 lb dumbbells for almost all the other exercises except the bench portion — on those days I’d go to the gym since I only keep up to 50 lb dumbbells at home.
What Are the Typical Results?
Everyone is unique with different genetics and body types (ectomorph, endomorph, mesomorph, etc.) — so results can vary. But the typical person will definitely build more muscle mass and lose body fat during the course of this program. As long as you’re eating properly (lots of quality protein and clean carbohydrates) you will definitely gain a significant amount of strength. Closely follow the workout and eating plan and you could gain 15-20 pounds of pure muscle.
How Much Does It Cost?
Body Beast is no longer sold as a standalone DVD kit — it’s included with a BODi subscription. That subscription also unlocks 225+ other programs and meal plans. BODi has monthly and yearly plans, with a 7-day free trial. Pricing and promos change — check the current offer on their site before you commit.
Who This Is For
- You want real strength gains, not just toning or cardio
- You already have (or are willing to buy) real dumbbells and a bench
- You’ve been doing a cardio-heavy program and want to rebuild strength
- You want a program that’s genuinely built for women too, not just men who want to bulk
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need a full home gym for this?
No, but you need more than a mat. A real dumbbell range, a bench, and a pull-up bar or bands cover almost everything in the program.
Is Body Beast good for women?
Yes — the Lean schedule specifically balances muscle-building with fat loss, and it’s not a smaller/modified afterthought version of the men’s program.
Body Beast or P90X — which should I do?
Body Beast is a dedicated bodybuilding program — heavier weight focus, less cardio. P90X mixes in more cross-training and cardio alongside the strength work. See our full comparison for the detailed breakdown.
The Bottom Line
If you’re looking for a good way to add mass, gain strength, and get bigger, this is one of the best options out there. Give it a try — you have a 90-day money-back guarantee, so you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
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