My Top Five Fat Loss Workouts

I recently moved, and so switched to a new gym.  But, before I left my old gym I had a really funny encounter.  I noticed a guy whom I'd chatted with from time to time, giving me an awkward up and down, so I gave him a nod.  He walked over to me, and told me that I'd gotten noticeably taller.  I told him in my haphazard Chinese that at 28 years old, it seemed unlikely that I'd had a noticeable growth spurt. I mentioned that I'd been losing fat, and he agreed that I looked thinner, but urged me to go and check my height, guaranteeing that I'd gained a few centimeters.  We agreed to disagree and the conversation turned to what I was doing to lose fat.  He was shocked to hear that I never once stepped foot on a treadmill or went jogging.  Those are the only real tried and tested ways to lose fat right?  

It seems that many people are at a loss when it comes to challenging and fun ways to burn fat. I want to share my favorite fat loss workouts with you.  These all take less than half an hour including a comprehensive warm up and cool down, and most take more like ten minutes. The principle for all of these workouts is that by exercising really intensely for a short time, you will increase your metabolic rate, and burn calories through something known as EPOC (Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption) or the so called "after burn" effect. So here are five challenging and intense, but also fun workouts.

Sprints

I've mentioned sprints before, and truly believe that they are the best cardio possible.  The only problem is that they suck.  If you truly push yourself when doing sprints, you will probably finish within ten minutes, and will need to lay on the ground begging for oxygen for another ten minutes. To have a good sprint work out you have to warm up properly.  If you don't, you WILL pull a muscle, I promise.  Jog for five minutes, do some high knee raises, butt kicks, squat jumps, side shuffles, and then some stretches for your hip flexors, hamstrings, and calves.  Pick a 40 or 50 meter path, and do two or three easy sprints, slowly increasing your speed.  Once you feel ready to push yourself safely, do your first sprint.  Keep the distance limited to 40 or 50 meters.  Sprint, immediately walk back to the start, and go again.  Do ten to fifteen sprints, gasp for air, walk for a few minutes and then go home. If you are feeling ambitious do ten burpees after each sprint, this is a great test of mental toughness.

Barbell Complexes

You are going to pick up a medium weight barbell and do three to ten different exercises without putting the bar down.  The number of reps will be the same for each movement, and should be between five and ten.  You will do all the reps on the first movement, then move on to the second movement.  After completing all the movements rest thirty to sixty seconds and then go again.  Repeat four or five times. The first time you try this only do three different movements, and add more as you see fit. The first time you will also want to be very conservative with the amount of weight you use.  The first round might be easy, but by the time you've done five rounds it won't be.  If you choose a weight that is too heavy, and the last round takes five minutes to complete because you keep dropping the bar, you have missed the point of this style of workout. Here are a couple of examples.

Beginner

Deadlift x 10

Power Clean x 10

Front Squat x10

Advanced

Deadlift x6

Shrug x6

Power Clean x6

Front Squat x6

Push Press x 6

Back Squat x6

You can program these yourself with a bit of common sense.  Arrange the movements such that you are working from the floor to the roof, and if you want to really go for it, work your way back down to the floor again.

Bodyweight Conditioning

This has always been one of my favorites because it's just so easy to do.  I often run out to the park, think of what I can use to workout, and then get at it.  My favorite style of programming for park workouts is to choose four or five different movements, start at a certain number of reps, and then subtract one rep each round.  For example

Round 1

Box Jumps x 12

Chin ups x 12

Lunges x12 per leg

Dips x 12

Round 2 is eleven reps of each, Round 3 is ten reps, etc. until you are down to only one rep.  It seems like it would get easier as you go, but because each round is faster you get less time to rest before doing the same movement again. With this style, try not to rest between rounds if you can. Get out to the park, take a look at what you have to work with, and get at it.

Jump Rope

Muhammad Ali did it, I rest my case.  This has been a main conditioning tool of successful athletes for a long time. If you can't jump rope efficiently now, just be patient.  It really takes no time at all to get proficient enough to burn fat.  My advice is to keep your elbows tucked as close to your body as you can, and really try to feel the tension on the rope.  You should be able to do it with your eyes closed. When jumping rope for fat loss, intervals work really well. Jump rope for one minute, rest for thirty seconds, and go again.  Repeat for ten to fifteen rounds.  My favorite jump rope workout is one minute of rope work, followed by ten burpees, then straight back to the rope.  You can replace the burpees with dumbell swings, jump squats, dumbell cleans, whatever you can think of.  I think the jump rope with burpees may be almost as tough as hill sprints, if you can push yourself and avoid resting after the burpees.  Catching your breath while jumping rope as fast as you can is intense.

Crossfit

Crossfit posts a new workout almost every day.  Go on their website, find a workout that appeals to you, check the times that other people are completing the workouts in, and go beat those times.  It can be humbling to see how fast some people are able to bang out some of the workouts on there.  My only advice here would be to pick workouts that fit into your workout plan.  If strength training, or building muscle is your goal and tomorrow is going to be a heavy squat day don't pick something that is going to fry your legs and prevent you from giving it your all on the squats.  Remember your priorities.  

This post ended up being far longer than I intended, but hopefully some of these ideas appeal to you, and have given you something new to work with.  With this kind of training, intensity is the key.  If these workouts take you longer than fifteen minutes (excluding warm up) then you are not going hard enough. As always, don't overthink this stuff.  Go out and do something.  You never know, something here may even make you taller, just like it did for me!

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What Now?

The Twelve Week Challenge is over, so have I reverted back to my old bad habits?  Actually, I've stepped it up a notch.  During those twelve weeks, I wanted to show with a sensible diet, weight training, and some sprinting you can both lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, and most importantly, without killing yourself.  I believe that my progress shows that it is possible to make a lot of good progress through moderation, in terms of both diet and exercise.

The thing is, I still have not reached all my goals.  I am not as lean as I would like to be, but at the same time I also want to build more muscle.  Quite the conundrum.  Is it possible to get to single digit body-fat (visible abs) while also gaining muscle?  I don't know either, but I'm working on it now. I've changed my approach slightly, and from what I've accomplished over the past two weeks, I now believe that it is possible.  The missing ingredient is, hard work.  If I look honestly at the premise of the Twelve Week Challenge it was basically to get as much as possible with the least amount of work.  This breaks the universal law of reaping and sowing.  If you put in moderate efforts you get moderate results, not extraordinary results.

Like I said, I'm stepping it up a notch.  Everyone these days talks about how if you exercise too much, or have too much volume in your training program you will become "over-trained".  Tell this to an Olympic lifter who is doing two squat training sessions every day of the week. Or to Ironman participants, who spend upwards of twelve hours training everyday in preparation for that event.  The bottom line is that you get out only what you put in.  

As a side note  I spoke with my father the other day about my new training plan.  When he was younger he was a big strong dude.  He got there by doing pullups, pushups, and situps everyday.  No fear of over-training  no scientific programming. He just did those three exercises everyday, and put full effort into it each day.  This is not to say that there aren't more efficient ways to train, but it illustrates the point that the attitude with which you train is more important than the actual program.  People who push themselves will succeed.

After two weeks of really working hard.  I'm happy
 with the results so far

I have gone back to a powerlifting based program, called Beyond 531.  It is an awesome program for increasing strength in the four main lifts: squat, deadlift, bench press, and overhead press.  This is the foundation of what I'm doing now.  Everyday I follow this program for one main lift.  After that I choose an exercise that is related to the main lift, and work up to a heavy set of three to five reps.  Then I immediately work my way back down in a huge drop set to get a lot of volume, and also get the "pump".  This is basically a combination of powerlifting and bodybuilding approaches. This style of training is really fun, but also super challenging.  After lifting really heavy weight, the last thing you want to do is push yourself to absolute fatigue with lighter weights.

For my condition work, after upper body workouts I do a high intensity "finisher" to burn fat and get my metabolism firing. This could be as simple as doing 100 burpees as fast as possible, or it could be a series of barbell exercises done back to back without ever putting the bar down.  Finishers are a great way to work on conditioning, burn fat, and develop some mental toughness.  They are challenging, but are also fun way to end a workout. On squat and deadlift days, I do a sprint workout 8 hours later in the evening.  On rest days, I do another high intensity finisher, and go for a long walk.  I'm really pushing myself hard now.  I'm choosing to work incredibly hard in order to get incredible results.  I'm choosing not to buy into the fear of "over-training".  It's just another experiment, and you will find all the results here and on facebook.

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Five Easy Steps to Awesomeness

I have five things that I try to make a part of my daily life. These things keep me on track nutritionally, keep me healthy, keep me fit, and keep me sane. Try to incorporate these five things into your life for unadulterated awesomeness.

Macros- hit em 

Set macro nutrient goals for yourself (help can be found here) and hit those goals. This allows you to figure out what adjustments to make to your diet if you aren't getting the results you want. You've gotta be honest with yourself though. Record what you actually ate, not what you should have eaten.  If you don't have reliable data, you can't make informed decisions when adjusting your diet. Besides, lying to yourself about what you are is worse than cheating at solitaire.

Move - more if you can

Exercising a few times a week is awesome. Props to you if you are already following a sensible weight training program. But, weight training aside, try to move more. I know that a thousand people have already told you to take stairs, and walk to work, and so on, so I won't repeat it. We are a lazy generation that wants to get everything by doing as little as possible. Get out of this mindset. You know you need to be more active. Don't over-think it, just move more.

Mobility- becausing having hips like your grandmother is not cool

I think that in terms of overall health benefits this might be number one. Get a foam roller, buy this book, and learn how to live in that body of yours. We do a world of damage to ourselves by sitting for hours on end in front of computers. Spending thirty minutes doing self-care is not too much to ask. It feels so good to reclaim proper range of motion in your spine, hips, and shoulders. The actual act of doing mobility work is downright horrid sometimes, but the benefit are immediate and carry over into every part of your life.

Meditate- that's right

I thought this was a little too new age and flaky at first too. I was dead wrong. We spend all this time on our bodies, fixated on the outward stuff when inside is a constant torrent of mayhem. Get that mind of yours under control, and I guarantee the benefits will carry over to every aspect of your life. Take five minutes before you sleep to focus on all the high tension areas in your body, and consciously relax them. This will improve your sleep, help you focus, make you happier, allow your body to heal better after intense workouts...the benefits of meditating are endless, so give it a shot.

Sprint - it's probably as close to feeling like a real athlete as you'll ever get

Sprinting will kick your ass. That's pretty much all there is to it. There are a million ways to include sprinting into your life. Don't over-complicate this! Twice a week go outside, warm up properly, and then move fast. You can run shuttle sprints, suicides, hill sprints, 100m, 200m, 400m sprints, sled sprints, even bike sprints on those rainy days. I can't stress enough the need to not over-think this. Playing ultimate frisbee could be your sprinting. Just move fast, rest until you can breathe semi-normally, and then move fast again.

I think that these five things can make an enormous difference to your life.  They will all teach you to take charge of yourself, and will make you stronger in every way possible. What am I missing here?  Let me know in the comments below or on facebook.

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My Current Workout Plan

So I thought I should write a quick summary of what my exercise plan looks like.  To be honest, it is an extremely simple program.  Because I am trying to lose fat, over the course of a week I am eating fewer calories than my body needs.  There are several days where I eat more calories than I need, as is the case with intermittent fasting.  These are the days when I go to the gym and lift weights.  I do this on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Monday
Bench Press:  Work up to a max set of 5 reps
                      Take off 10% of the weight and do one more set
Incline Dumbell Press: 3 sets of 6-9reps
Dumbell Rows: 3 sets of 6-10 reps
Tricep Extensions: 4 sets of 8-12 reps
Curls: 3 sets of 6-9 reps

Wednesday
Glute Ham Raises: 3 sets of 6-9 reps
Squat: Work up to a max set of 5 reps
           Take off 10% of the weight and do one more set
Deadlift: Work up to a max set of 5 reps

Friday
Pullups: 3 sets of as many as possible with good form
Overhead press: 1 set of 4-6 reps, 1 set of 6-9 reps, 1 set of 8-10 reps
Hanging Leg Raises: 3 sets of as many as possible
Facepulls: 3 sets of 10-12
Curls: 3 sets of 8-10

All of these workouts take around 40 minutes to complete.  My goal is to go as heavy as possible on the big exercises like squats, deadlifts, bench, and overhead press.  When losing fat, you have to lift heavy to convince your body that it still needs the muscle.  The other exercises are down at lower intensity, but still with a focus on adding weight whenever it is possible.

If I were not dieting right now I would be doing a program like starting strength, or stronglifts.  I used this method of lifting before I began the 12 Week Challenge and was making consistent strength gains.  Using that style of training I went from barely being able to squat anything to squatting twice my bodyweight.  These kinds of programs only work if you are eating to grow though.  So that is why I've switched to a lower volume approach for these 12 weeks.

For cardio, I do morning walks of 30-45 minutes, five times a week. This is just brisk pace walking. After my workouts on Monday and Friday, I go and run hill sprints.  The hill sprints take about 20 minutes to complete, and they are incredibly tough.  I chose hill sprints because unlike traditional moderate intensity cardio that can cause muscle loss, hill sprints are muscle sparring and can even cause muscle growth....also hill sprints are just bad ass and fun.

That is all I'm doing.  Dieting, walking, lifting heavy weights, and hill sprints twice a week.  If I were feeling under-recovered the hill sprints would be the first to go.  Any questions, please let me know!

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