Slim for Life (8 page)

There are several ways to do this, and I define these types of moves in three ways:
Combo Lifts,
Mash Ups, and
Shredders. A Combo Lift is when you perform one exercise, then directly move into another without resting. A Mash Up is when you perform two moves at the same time. A Shredder is a move that organically trains multiple muscle groups at the same time and has you moving and changing position. Combo Lifts are easier because they don’t require as much coordination, strength, or stability as a Mash Up or a Shredder, so start with these and work your way up. Here are some sample moves for you to try:

You may have noticed the exercises I’ve listed in this chapter are fairly self-explanatory or easily looked up for the novice. With many of the Shredders, though, the name doesn’t tell you all you need to know, so I’ve given you a brief description on how to perform it. You can also find most of these on the Internet, if you would like a visual example.

Hip Heists
—From a crouch position on all fours (balls of the feet and palms on the floor), bring your right knee under and across your body toward your left armpit. Then bring your left arm back behind you so you rotate your body to face upward, knees bent, balancing on heels and palms. Then rotate back to the start position by bringing the right heel under and across your body toward your left shoulder, while bringing your left arm around and over. Then repeat on the opposite side.

Crab Walk
—Sit on the floor with knees bent, arms straight, and hands placed close to the hips, fingers pointing forward. Lift into a bridge position and “walk” 4 steps forward and 4 steps back, making sure to walk the opposite foot and hand at the same time.

Bear Crawl
—Get on all fours with knees lifted so they don’t touch the floor, and crawl forward 4 steps, then back 4 steps. Make sure to move the opposite hand and foot simultaneously.

Rolling Side Plank Kicks
—Lie sideways, propped on your forearm with your knees bent. Lift your torso up into a side plank. While balanced on the bottom knee, extend your top leg out to the side in a side-kick or locked-out position with foot flexed. Lower to the mat, roll onto your other side, and repeat the side plank and kick. Roll back. Continue to alternate sides.

Turkish Get-ups
—Lie face up, one arm extended vertically, while holding a light dumbbell. Sit up, cross legs, and stand, keeping arm extended, then reverse and return to lying. Repeat, holding dumbbell with same hand for 30 seconds, then hold dumbbell in the other hand for a second pass.

The possibilities are endless, and the results are fast and furious. Plus, training in this fashion will save you time and make your body far more functional.

Often people ask me how many sets or how many reps to perform of a certain exercise. It’s likely, if you’ve been seeking this information, that you’ve heard differing advice, from doing low reps with heavy weight to high reps with low weight. Or maybe you’ve heard to vary your sets with your reps, as in one week do one set of 50 reps then the next week do three sets of 20 reps. While there’s nothing wrong with mixing things up in this way, there’s an ideal number of sets for
Slim for Life
and a way to answer the reps question as well.

The key to getting results is to
fatigue your muscles, so it’s often recommended that you do more than one set of an exercise if not three, four, or five. My issue: I don’t want you to be repetitive with your training. I would rather you train your muscles from all different angles with a variety of exercises than repeat one move
for multiple sets. When you train a muscle with diversity both in exercise and
angles, you hit more muscle fibers and condition the muscle more thoroughly, leading to better and faster results. (More on this in the next tip.)

The ideal is for you to perform two sets of each exercise (which should be built into a circuit format, remember?), for 30 seconds per exercise, as I said earlier, as opposed to a set number of reps. Since I’m big on no repeats with your moves to add variety and boost results, you might wonder why I don’t tell you to just do one set. The answer is that if you’re working unilaterally (on one side), you must repeat the set to train the other side. For example, if you do a set of pendulum lunges with biceps curls on the right leg, you obviously need to do a second set so you can train the left leg equally.

And the reason I like 30 seconds as far as reps are concerned is that that time frame allows you to max out your potential. You can still play with heavier and lighter weights, but the key is to do as many as you can in that 30 seconds with good form. Under this guideline your body will automatically adjust the reps according to capability.

For
Slim for Life,
I’ve got you doing two sets of 30 seconds each per exercise so you can optimize your workout with a variety of moves to fatigue your muscles. By training the same muscles in multiple directions or angles, you create better muscle tension and fire up more muscle fibers! Plus, it helps you avoid a training plateau, where your muscles are so accustomed to doing the same exercises in the same way that they simply cease to respond as effectively.

I’m going to get just a little science-y for a sec, but I’ll try to keep it simple. Here’s the deal. Take your shoulders, for example: you have muscle fibers running in three directions—front, side, and
rear—which comprise the three parts of your shoulders or deltoids. If you want defined, sexy shoulders, with striated cuts that show when you lift your arm, you must hit the shoulder from all angles. If you train only with front arm raises and never lift from the side or rear, those other muscle fibers essentially don’t get taxed, and there goes your shoulder definition.

So remember to use
diversification with your exercises in order to hit the muscles from different angles and accelerate to insane results.

Forget the “target fat-burning zone”—you know, that moronic theory that during your workout you should exercise at a moderate
intensity (65 to 70 percent of your maximum heart rate) to burn predominantly fat calories. That’s utter crap and a massive waste of time. The exact opposite is true. For exceptional results, you want to be working out at a higher overall intensity of around 85 percent of your maximum heart rate.

Let me explain. During physical training, your body has three possible
sources of
energy:
glucose and glycogen (
blood sugar and sugar stored in the muscles), fat, and
protein. Protein is a last resort—of the three energy sources, your body is least likely to draw on its protein. Whether your body takes energy from its sugar stores or its fat stores depends on the intensity of your workout. Training at a high level of intensity forces your body to draw upon a higher percentage of its glucose and glycogen stores, because they’re a more efficient source of fuel, which your body will need during intense training. If you’re training at low intensity, your body doesn’t need to be as efficient, so it will draw on a higher percentage of fat calories for fuel.

It sounds like low-intensity training would be more effective when it comes to losing fat, right?
Wrong.
These physiological facts
have led to the mistaken belief that low-intensity training is better than high-intensity training when it comes to burning fat and losing weight.

The truth is that even though a higher
percentage
of fat calories are used during low-intensity exercise, the
total
number of fat calories used during high-intensity training is greater because more overall calories are burned. Let me illustrate my point with two studies, one from the
New England Journal of Medicine
and the other from the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM).

The first study shows that a 200-pound guy who walks 3 miles per hour on a level surface for 60 minutes burns 5.25 calories a minute. Now, when the same guy jogs at 6 miles per hour for 60 minutes, he burns 16.22 calories per minute. Okay, let’s take a look at the math here. Jogging and working out at a higher intensity burned
975
calories compared to the 315 calories that he burned walking and working out a lower intensity. He burned 660 more
total calories
.

In the second study, ten subjects exercised at a low intensity, walking 3.8 miles per hour for 30 minutes. They burned 8 calories a minute, equaling 240 total calories. Of the 240 calories burned, 59 percent (144 calories) came from
glucose and glycogen and 41 percent (96 calories) came from fat. This same group then exercised for 30 minutes at 6.5 miles per hour, burning 15 calories a minute. They burned 450 total calories, with 76 percent from glucose and glycogen (342 calories) and 24 percent from fat (108 calories). So they burned 210 total calories more (450–240) and 12 more fat calories, too (108–96).

As you can see, even though the percentage of fat calories burned is higher during low-intensity training, during the high-intensity workout you’re burning many more fat calories and many more total calories overall.

But wait—there’s more. What do you think happens to glucose
and glycogen calories that don’t get burned? They turn into stored fat. That’s why, at the end of the day, the main determinant of weight loss is quantity of calories burned, not the composition of the calories burned.

My last thought on this, I promise. If you exercise at a higher
heart rate and intensity, your body will burn far more calories long after that workout is over. This, as I mentioned earlier, is called
afterburn. One of the advantages of training at greater intensity, particularly with
strength training, is that it can boost your metabolism so that you’re actually
burning more calories at a resting or base level. Your body becomes more efficient from training so you become a calorie-burning furnace—that’s the goal!

As I mentioned, I want you working at 85 percent of your maximum heart rate while training. To figure out what this number is and how to attain it, simply plug your info into this simple equation:

Subtract your age from the number 220. This will give you your
maximum heart rate (MHR). So if I am 38, my MHR is 220 – 38 = 182. Then I want to work predominantly at around 85 percent of that number, except from when I throw my
HIIT (high-intensity interval training—more on that soon) Interval into the mix (which works at nearly 100 percent MHR). So I multiply 0.85 times 182 and end up with 155 beats a minute. You don’t need a heart rate monitor to track this, even though it would be helpful. All you have to do is stop and count your heartbeats for six seconds during your training and then multiply by 10. I know that I need my heart to beat 15 to 16 times every six seconds to be at 155 beats a minute, working optimally at 85 percent of my MHR.

Knowing your heart rate lets you become more familiar with what intensity it takes for you to optimally burn calories. If you want an easier way to track it: you shouldn’t be gasping for air while working out, but carrying on a conversation should be a struggle.

Don’t get stuck in a workout rut. Instead, mix up your workouts on a regular basis. Doing this provides multiple benefits. First, it keeps your mind from getting bored. Second, it keeps your body from plateauing for both physical performance and weight loss. Third, it’s critical for your overall health as well as your fitness efficiency that you train with “
holistic equality.” That means you need to work your body to emphasize many different skills—speed, power, agility, balance, flexibility—to become a more well-rounded athlete. This is great for preventing injury and for enhancing your exercise capabilities—and you’ll get a better calorie burn.

If you’re thinking,
I don’t know how to train myself in all these different ways,
the simple fix is to take a variety of classes. Most gyms, if you belong to one, have a wide range of class offerings. You can basically take a different class every day. To keep it fresh, take a yoga class for flexibility and core strength; take a boot camp class for power, speed,
muscle endurance, and agility; and take an indoor cycling class for cardio stamina and leg strength. Or take a class that offers it all, like kickboxing. I endeavored to do this with BODYSHRED, and it not only gets people lean, it makes them truly fit.

I don’t want you to overthink this one. Just try new things with your fitness by experimenting with different workout types. If you do so, it will all fall into place for you automatically.

Want to get slim while putting in less time at the gym? Then you need to learn to
HIIT it right. HIIT stands for high-intensity interval training. If any term has been overused in fitness over the last
couple of years, this may be it, but for a very good reason. HIIT is an exercise strategy that alternates periods of short, intense anaerobic exercise with less-intense recovery periods. Current research clearly shows that if you want the most efficient cardio workout, HIIT is it. If you compare high-intensity interval training with continuous, steady-state training, there really is no contest; HIIT is
the
game changer when it comes to calorie burn and fat utilization.