Non-Cardio Fat Loss

by Jim Smith, C.S.C.S.

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Cardio is like brussels sprouts, a station wagon, and that nice but dorky girl who likes you all rolled into one: You know it does good things for you, but it’s bland and boring, and you’d do almost anything to find an excuse to stand it up. If you’re a hardcore gym-goer, worried about developing heart disease if you don’t do cardio, or simply under the impression that you can’t lose fat and see your abs without it, chances are you’ll slog through weekly treadmill runs anyway.

But the only time in life you should be forced to do something you hate is when you visit relatives over the holidays—not when you work out in the gym. The fact is you can train your heart and your muscles in less time than it takes to complete most cardio work- outs, all while doing your favorite fitness activity—lifting weights.

For the next eight weeks, we won’t ask you to jog even as far as to the end of the room, but you’ll still have the best cardio sessions of your life and lose perhaps as much as 16 pounds of pure fat. At the same time, you’ll retain every ounce of muscle mass you’re currently carrying—maybe even gain some—and you’ll correct muscle imbalances. The Non-Cardio Fat-Loss program awaits.

THE SIMPLE COMPLEX
By now, you’re probably stumped. What could possibly account for the kind of results we’re promising (and not require illegal performance-enhancing substances)?Meet the complex (also called a circuit), a favorite training technique among athletes such as martial artists, wrestlers, and strongmen—guys who don’t even own running shoes but have hearts so powerful they could pump water through a 40-story building. A complex is a series of two or more exercises performed in succession for a specific num- ber of reps with limited rest intervals. In other words, you move through one exercise after the other, using the same number of reps for each. You can perform them with one or more barbells, one or more dumbbells, or your own body weight, or as a mixture of any combination therein (as we offer here). Complexes can hit the entire body in one fell swoop, or you can do a complex for the upper and lower body separately (all three are useful methods and should be cycled into your training, as fat loss requires continual changeups in your workouts to keep making progress). Performing the exercises of a complex once through is called a run. In the beginning of our program, just one run will be su∞cient (and about all you’ll be able to handle). As you improve over the next eight weeks, you’ll do more runs (up to three). You can also increase the intensity of a complex by reducing your rest time between runs or increasing the number of reps you perform on the exercises, both of which we’ve programmed for you on the pages that follow. Still not sold?Check out the following—a short list of the many benefits of complex training:

SHORTER WORKOUTS
Saying these workouts won’t take long may be the understament of the millennium—they may take only three and a half minutes! That’s right, run through the exercises once and go home. However, don’t take this as a sign that complexes are easy—you’re going to earn the right to go home early. You have to adhere to the pacing of the workout, resting only as long as it takes to move to your next exercise, or else it won’t work. But whether you’re training half the body with a complex or the whole body at once, you’re going to work a ton of muscle mass very quickly and send your heart rate soaring. As you progress on our program, you’ll do more runs and rest less time between runs, making for extremely dense work- outs in short periods of time. No workout will take more than 24 minutes.