Believe it or not, it is definitely possible...and it's not very complicated either. In fact, I use this with some of my clients...and I have even done it myself a few times over.
Hard, yes...probably because of the nature (intensity) of the work you'll be doing. But not unreasonably difficult. It just takes the right planning, the right science, 100% of your effort and execution.
Here I will lay out a few of the secrets to achieving such lightning fast results. You think you are ready for the challenge?
- Organized Planning
- A Resolute Mind
- Metabolic Workouts
- HIIT Cardio Conditioning
- Balanced Nutrition with a Caloric Deficit
- 7-9 hours Sleep per night
For any worthwhile endeavor, adequate and appropriate preparation will make all the difference in the world.
You need to be ready for anything that might come along to deter you from your goal, so proper planning gives you the best chance to succeed...and it saves you tons of time in the long run.
Take 1/2 hour to an hour to prepare for your week's workouts, meals and any other activities that make up your standard week (you know, like work and chores and dates and such) and set aside 10-15 minutes at the end or beginning of each day to ensure you are fully prepared for that day's needs.
This proactive approach alone will work wonders for increasing your daily effectiveness, and you will be giving up less than an hour to prevent several hours of wasted time otherwise.
A Resolute Mind:
Walk into the situation with your mind already resolved to follow through and succeed. This firmness of mind will help you to smash through obstacles standing in your way, or at least figure out how to quickly and efficiently get around them. Your mind is an amazingly powerful tool, and it's time for you to use that tool to the max!
Metabolic Workouts:
Now to the really fun stuff...the physical training!
Metabolic Workouts are basically a cross between resistance training and cardio. Utilizing a circuit format, a total body workout is usually performed in a minimal amount of time. They're quick and ultra-effective at shredding off unwanted body fat!
Besides burning off lots of calories during the workout, this style of training creates huge EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption)...aka the "afterburn"...which means you have elevated metabolism for as much as 36-48 hours following the workout where you burn even more calories. In fact, the "afterburn" effect of metabolic workouts AND HIIT cardio (to be described next) both result in as much as 9 TIMES THE FAT burned from traditional steady state cardio sessions (where you go pretty much the same pace the whole time for 30-60 minutes). Now that is what I call EFFECTIVE TRAINING!
I will get into more of the details on metabolic workouts in the next article, but the key is to hit all the major movements of the body (push, pull, rotation, core work, compound leg movements like squat and deadlift variations) for 15-30 second sets back-to-back-to-back(and maybe even one or two more consecutive exercises) with very brief transitional rest (like 15 seconds or less), before resting a whopping 30-60 seconds till you repeat the cycle.
It could take 30 minutes or less to do a thorough, butt-kicking metabolic workout...from warm up to cool down. You really only need 3 sets per circuit, and three different circuits of three exercises gets the job done and then some!
Knock these out 3 times a week (giving a day between sessions), and you'll see your abs in no time!
Metabolic workouts are certainly intense, but that's what we get for shortening the duration of our training time...besides, this is 9 times more effective anyway, so it's worth it!
HIIT Cardio:
HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training, and basically it's where you alternate between high and low level intensities during cardiovascular activities. You might run or bike as hard as you can for 20 seconds, then follow it up with 60 seconds of lower level recovery pace. The ratio of work to rest really depends on the duration of the work interval, but typically it's somewhere between 1:4 and 1:1 (work:rest).
You may only need to do 15 minutes or less of work because it takes just 6-12 repetitions to complete the workout.
This can be extremely strenuous, but not much beats this conditioning and the fat just melts off!
(Of course, for both metabolic workouts and HIIT cardio you'll want to warm up adequately, for physical AND mental preparation.)
Balanced Nutrition with a Caloric Deficit:
If you are looking to lose significant body fat, then you typically need to be in an appropriate caloric deficit. In general, that means you need to burn more calories than you consume...aka move more than you eat.
This is one aspect of fitness though, that gets highly misunderstood because simply cutting out the majority of your food (dramatic caloric deficit) quickly has a reverse effect.
Keeping it in simple terms, your body will do whatever it can to find stability, so if there is a significant threat of starvation (with holding from eating) then there are several bodily systems that kick in and basically bring your metabolism to a screeching halt until it approximately matches your intake. It doesn't want to lose that valuable stored energy, so it slows everything down to compensate instead (if it uses anything it will be that priceless lean tissue we call muscle...which we don't want to lose).
So we have to find the right type of a deficit without overdoing it.
For the most part that has been found to be a deficit of somewhere around 500-1000 calories per day. Since there are 3500 cals in a pound of fat, that's about 1-2 pounds per week (or our 1% body fat).
Now there are a lot of intricacies involved with caloric deficits, but one formula I like to use is the Katch-McArdle: 370 + (21.6 x your lean body mass in kilograms). It sounds complicated, but basically it's your Resting Metabolic Rate (the minimum amount of calories you need to sustain your body's major needs and maintain your lean body mass/muscle). It may be the bare minimum needed, but almost everyone UNDERcalculates their caloric consumption (at least 16%) so this way you leave a margin for error.
Either way, eating a certain amount of calories per day is not going to solve the problem on it's own.
You need to factor in the other two what I call "Undeniable Truths of Nutrition:" Nutrient timing and Quality.
To optimize your metabolism, you need to eat balanced meals about every 2-4 waking hours, or about 5-7 times throughout the day. "Balanced" here means the macronutrients...so protein, carbs and fat. Without getting into too much detail, protein has 4 calories per gram, carbs also have 4 calories per gram and fat has 9 calories per gram. I am a big fan of following how many GRAMS you consume of each macronutrient over the tedious task of actually counting calories. It's far quicker, easier and you can identify portion sides much better in grams.
The majority of people fall in a 30/50/20 ratio of protein/carbs/fat (or within 5% in any direction), so that means whatever your Resting Metabolic Rate is, 30% should come from protein, 50% from carbs and 20% from fat. That would be considered a "balanced" meal format. (There are several other ways to manipulate the ratios, depending on the goals how you organize your program, but this is the easiest way to look at it.)
Finally, we're looking at QUALITY. Simply enough, 1000 calories of burgers and fries are not the same as 1000 calories in chicken and broccoli. A calorie is NOT just a calorie....quality matters. We could go all day about what is "healthy" or ideal and what is not (this article is already far too long!), but the basic ideas are these: Eat foods that occur naturally, from the earth or from something living/formerly alive and avoid most things in a box (highly processed foods)...or at McDonald's (for example). You don't have to be PERFECT all of the time, but making a conscious effort to gravitate towards the quality foods that are high in nutrients and relatively low in calories and away from foods that are high in calories but low in nutrition is a significant step in the right direction.
Nutrition can be one of the trickiest parts of a fitness program, but beginning by taking the steps laid out here will work wonders for achieving your goal asap.
7-9 Hours Sleep per Night:
We all know that sleep is important. We all acknowledge that we need to rest. But most of us struggle with actually making it happen. (I am up 1/2 an hour past my bedtime just writing this article...)
To get to the point, all the work mentioned above will mean nothing if you don't allow your body the proper recovery time.
You put the stimulus on the body to change from the exercise you do and the nutrition you consume, but it actually does its changing while you are deep asleep. You need to hit that deep, REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep for the body to effectively do its thing in response to your workouts.
Despite how much sleep you've "gotten by on" for the past ump-teen years, you absolutely need a minimum AVERAGE of at least 7 hours of sleep a night. Some you will get more, others less. But the idea is that you need to hit about 2 cycles of that deep sleep for optimal (or at least decent quality) sleep.
Young people (chit'lins, teens, early adults) need more like 9 hours OR MORE because they have so many growth/hormonal things going on at night...and there's no point in stunting growth. That extra few hours of waking time is not worth that...
So allow your body to do what it does best at night when you sleep so you can do your best during the day when you are training or just plain living.
Those are the key points of making sure you getting the most from your training and really shredding off that unwanted body fat as quickly and healthily as possible.
Hope that helps you and I hope even more that it sparks even more questions and curiosity from you about optimal fitness (what I call "The True Way").
Do me a favor and drop any questions or concerns you have about this list and I will be back in the next couple days to answer them and give you more details on the individual items listed above.
Train hard and smart...just make sure you keep training!
Yours in Fitness,
Chad R. Johnson
PS-Post your comments/questions below and we'll see what kind of response we can get the next couple of days!
