AtoZfitness – Free Fitness Magazine Publishing Only The best Fitness Articles & The Best FItness Products
Great thought provoking email I just received from my good friend dr.Kareem and would like to share it with you all.
Today’s email is to be treated as a “thought exercise.”
How would your schedule, goals, and priorities change if you’re able lose fat 10x faster?
- Would you do it?
- How much weight or fat would you lose?
A while back, I realized that fat loss wasn’t that hard at all. Now, I say this with a bit of hesitation, as I used to find fat loss nearly impossible. I used to try to lose weight, be successful sometimes, and ultimately find out my body had somehow become ‘less’ healthy and ultimately gain weight back (and then some) more easily.
Fast forward — and with a few secrets I’ve learned along the way — and I now understand the natural ebbs and flows of fat loss and why it’s more important to setup your body to lose fat than it is to select the perfect method, program, etc. In other words, I find the ‘priming stage’ to be the most important.
But, let’s go backwards for a second… the goal was 10x, right? What about time? If you had to work out 10x more, would you still want to lose 10x the amount of fat? I doubt it… so time matters, too. As I started thinking about this challenge, I decided I had 2 criteria before I’d present the information to you:
- 10x normal fat loss
- 10% of the normal time spent
Let’s better define “normal:”
- Normal speed of fat loss or weight loss = one pound or two per week.
- Normal amount of time spent to do this (according to ACSM guidelines): 4+ days of cardio (40-60 minutes per session) + 2-3 days of resistance training (30+ minutes per session) per week.
The bar is set high, and now it’s time to experiment.
Let’s start with exercise:
- We’ll want super short sessions — 5 minutes each
- This equals 4 sessions per week, where 2 sessions are 6 minutes each.
- My proposed schedule will be as follows: Sunday, Tuesday, Thu
rsday, Saturday and we’ll make our “long” days Tuesday and Thursday.
The reason we’re allowing a day of rest in between workouts is to maximize the metabolic effect of each workout.
As for the ‘type’ of exercise, we have choices. Most importantly, we have to rest most of every workout, such that we have extreme effort/intensity within each set, and a work to rest ratio of about: 1 to 5. This will help ensure we are burning calories, building faster twitch muscle, and increasing our VO2 max at all times.
As hard as it may be to believe, here’s the way I like to set things up:
- 5 minutes of total exercise
- Alternate type of workout (dynamic, weight-based vs bodyweight, swim vs land, etc.)
- 10 seconds of work, with explosive amounts of intensity
- 50 seconds of rest
- 5 or 6 total sets
- every other day
When it comes to ‘diet’ or food, we’re going to get strict for a week:
- Super hydrate each morning and evening — drink two 16 ounce glasses of cold water both when you wake up and when you go to bed. (in addition to normal water intake)
- Eat Paleo (this is the only way I know how to control for your weight during this week, although I’m open to alternatives. It’s how I’ve personally been able to achieve my best results, and how I’ve been able to coach clients, friends, and family members to achieve the same thing.)
- Implement the 717 Rule, which means: 7 grams of sugar per day, and only 17 grams of carbs, total. On Day 7, you get to cheat (after you weigh in)
- Reduce excessive sodium intake to avoid swelling and reduce the amount of water weight you might be holding onto.
- Go to bed hungry and wake up hungry(ier.)
- Eat within 30 minutes of any workout, and eat less on the days you don’t work out. If you are absolutely famished, there’s a reason for it, and I want you to control your urges to binge.
Now, here is the most important part: Mindset.
Enter: Auto-Shred Mode.
I’ve got a really good buddy who recently traveled with me in Puerto Rico; he came to visit from Hong Kong while I was getting ready to shoot a new DVD series, so the timing was such that I was planning to get a bit leaner for the camera. However, I wanted to do it in 5 minutes, every other day. Long story short, he thought that it was impossible, and decided to join me.
Within about 12 hours, I had him absolutely convinced he was already shredding. This started as a joke, by saying something like:
Can you feel it, dude? (you’re shredding — right now.)
…then, changing to an occasional whisper as I walked by him and said “SHRED.”
…which proceeded to turn into: Can you see it? I’m shredding right now. Are you?
And eventually progressed to a laughing state, an exchange back and forth, and him thinking I was completely absurd. While I agree it is absurd to start getting leaner that fast, without doing anything, I cannot begin to express — with enough importance — the importance of connecting your body and mind. If you are to achieve the impossible, you have to believe you will.
***
The exercise, food, and mindset recommendations you just read constitute the program we followed. Here are our results:
- I lost about 7.5 pounds in 7 days, and I forgot to weigh myself until after a HUGE cheat meal, so that might have been closer to about 9 or 9.5 pounds (not bad for starting around 15% bodyfat.) Within 18 days, I was ready for the shoot, at 9% bodfat.
- I believe my buddy, Dan, lost about 15 or 16 pounds, and was leaner than he had ever been. Dan, for reference, is an elite-level soccer player, who’s played in college, and since then, all over Asia in his adulthood. Before accepting this challenge, his typical workout routine involved a few nights of soccer per week + 1-2 hour workouts, a few times per week. Dan’s first 10 pounds came off in the first week.
So, you’ve got our formula now. The question is whether or not you’re up for the challenge. If you are, here are your instructions:
Instructions:
- ‘Prime’ your body for 30 days, in an effort to prepare for rapid weight loss with minimal effort. Double Edged Fat Loss is the best way to do this, as it works on your Nervous System first, or your body’s ability to send a great nerve signal to your muscles, so you can get more from every rep of every exercise you do.
- After your body is primed, it’s time for you to use the ‘5 Minutes to Look Younger’ Follow-Along DVD series, as this is the exact method I used and trained with in Puerto Rico (with the one difference that I mixed in a 5 minute ocean swim, instead of one of these workouts, 1 day per week.)In particular, you’ll want to emphasize the ‘Heart Rate Recovery’ and ‘Increase Your Metabolism’ workouts. If you have any imbalances, be sure to spend some additional time working out with me on disc 4.
One of my least favorite words is “reasonable.” I don’t understand it, and it doesn’t apply to my life. I don’t recommend you apply it to yours, either.
Here’s to winning,
-k
