Last week I helped Men's Health magazine on a piece about getting workouts done
fast. Personally, I think you can get a great body-changing workout done in minutes.
How fast?
I'm talking 10-minutes. By now, I'm sure you're asking...
How do you lose fat in only ten minutes?
or
What about the rule that it takes 20 minutes of cardio before you start burning
fat?
Well, first of all, as I have said before, the whole idea of a fat-burning zone
or a magical fat-burning time period just doesn't fit with the common sense approach
to fat loss.
People can lose fat without doing any cardio at all - so its clear that you don't
have to workout for at least 20-minutes with your heart rate at 60% of your maximum
heart rate. Fat loss is far simpler than that – and I'll show you some basic
workouts below that crank your metabolism and help you burn calories when you are
not exercising.
Second, the results of your training occur outside of the gym rather than during
the workout. That's why the before-mentioned "increased metabolism" is
so important. If you put the right "turbulence" on your muscles in 10-minutes,
you can change your body - without even thinking about doing cardio.
So let's look at the first fat loss in a hurry workout – a 10-minute bodysculpting
workout. Let's say you only have 10 minutes to do your workout today - what should
you do?
In this case, you need to combine a warm-up, strength training, and interval training
all into one. So our efforts are best put forward on bodyweight training.
And you don't have time for isolation work. Instead, you need to hit three "hot
zones" on the body for maximum metabolism boosting: push muscles, pull muscles,
and legs.
By doing so, you'll hit all the other muscle groups at the same time. So you'll
do a circuit of soemthing like:
1A) Prisoner Squats (advanced option: 1-Leg Squats)
1B) Pushups (advanced option: Spiderman Pushups)
1C) Inverted Rows (advanced option: Pull-ups; easy option:
Stick-ups)
In the first round of this circuit, you'll go through it easy.
Perform 25% of the maximum number of reps you can do for each exercise. So if you
can do 20 pushups, do only 5 in the first
warm-up circuit. That's a warm-up circuit.