Guest Post by Dennis Heenan
Author: Super Hero Body
There I was, out on another 5-mile run after finishing my weight lifting workout… This is what I needed to do in order to keep off the fat while trying to put on muscle, right?
Knees aching, back hurting, and shins splints setting in… I kept pounding the pavement.
All these long hours of cardio will pay-off… So I thought…
See the problem with what I was doing was that I was absolutely ruining my body and frankly killing my results too.
I was in the mindset, like millions of everyday gym-goers, that the longer I worked out the better results I would see.
After keeping this routine up for a month or so, my body finally gave up on me. With my knees killing and back aching, I knew these 5-mile runs after my already difficult workout couldn’t continue.
So instead, I started bumping up the intensity in my workouts by randomly placing “sprint-like” exercises at the end of certain circuits. This was my cardio.
Knowing that this was the only cardio I was going to be doing for my workouts, I made sure I pushed extremely hard.
Now here’s why I tell you all this… The cardio aspect of my workouts went from 5-miles to about 5 total minutes…
YET, within the next month I saw more results than I had seen in the previous 3 months. Not only did my cardio drastically increase, but my lean muscle growth improved, fat burning improved, and my body was feeling better than ever.
Here’s why:
According to a recent study, researchers found that individuals who spent 300 hours doing cardio workouts throughout the course of the year, lost an average of just 5 pounds.
That equates to about 50 hours of working out to lose just ONE single pound…
On top of that, another study showed that the combination of diet and traditional cardio caused participants to lose up to 22% of their lean muscle from their workouts.
In comparison, participants who combined diet and higher intensity resistance training saw 97% fat loss and only 3% lean muscle loss (that is incredible).
That’s a 19% difference!
This is the reason I was able to see more fat burning and lean muscle growth in the workouts I was doing.
By kicking up the intensity at certain times during the workout, I was allowing my body to use fat as its preferred source of energy.
The truth is, when you figure out how to properly utilize high intensity threshold training exercises in your workouts, you will start rapidly losing fat.
Combine this with strength training, and you have a killer one-two combo for burning fat and building lean muscle at the same time (which is exactly what you want).
So exactly what kind of workout can you go through in order to elicit these kind of awesome results?
I’ve put together a workout for you below that you can try. The keys to remember are:
- First focus on building strength and getting stronger. The stronger you are, the more sexy, lean muscle you will have… which in turn will help you burn more fat.
- Push as hard as you can for as long as you can in your “sprint” exercise. The closer you can work near your anaerobic threshold here, the better results you will see.
Alright, let’s take a look at the workout:
Workout Description: Move from one exercise to the next with no rest in between. Rest 60-90 between full rounds and repeat 3 total times.
- Single Arm Squat to Press: 7 reps each side
- Goblet Bulgarian Split Squat: 7 reps each side
- T-Pushups: 7 reps on each side
- Sprints in Place: Push as hard as you for as long as you can until you feel yourself slowing down
- Rest 60-90 seconds and repeat 2 more times for a total of 3 rounds.
As you can see, three great strength exercises that we are completing back to back to back, then we place our threshold exercise at the very end to finish off each circuit.
This simple yet very challenging combo is what will allow you to build up a ton of strength while also pushing your anaerobic threshold (burning a ton of fat) at the same time.
And what’s great about this way of training is that it can be done in under 30-minutes. You can’t beat that if you ask me.
If you want to learn more from Dennis, take a look at Super Hero Body