The All-Day Fat-Burning Diet: The 5-Day Food-Cycling Formula That Resets Your Metabolism To Lose Up to 5 Pounds a Week (26 page)

ROMANIAN DEADLIFTS (WITH DUMBBELLS OR BAR)

Muscles worked: glutes, hamstrings

Put a barbell (or two dumbbells) in front of you on the ground and grab it using a pronated (palms facing down) grip with your hands a little wider than shoulder-width apart. Bend your knees slightly and keep your core strong and back straight. Keeping your back and arms completely straight at all times, use the back of your legs/hips to “pull” the weight off the ground and up to the front of your thighs so that you’re in a standing position. Once you are standing completely straight up, keep your core strong and lower the weight back to the floor by pushing your hips back, only slightly bending your knees. Repeat for the recommended amount of repetitions.

ALTERNATING REVERSE SHOULDER PRESSES

Muscles worked: shoulders, triceps

Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and core and glutes contracted. Hold a dumbbell at each shoulder. Now, press both weights above your shoulders, keep the right arm straight (holding the weight), and lower the left arm/weight to your left shoulder. Press the left arm/weight back to top, hold, and lower the right arm/weight. That’s one repetition. Repeat for required number of reps.

CHINUPS (OR LAT PULLDOWNS)

Muscles worked: biceps, back

To perform lat pulldowns, refer to the
instructions
.

To perform chinups, grab the pullup bar with your palms facing your torso and your hands closer than shoulder-width apart. Pull your torso up until your head is around the level of the pullup bar. Concentrate on using your biceps muscles in order to perform the movement. Keep your elbows close to your body. After a second of squeezing your biceps in the contracted position (at the top), slowly lower your torso back to the starting position so your arms are fully extended. Repeat this motion for the prescribed amount of repetitions.

AB WHEEL (OR BALL) ROLLOUTS

Muscles worked: core

Kneel on the floor and hold the Ab Roller with both hands (or place your forearms on a stability ball) in front of you. Slowly roll the ab roller (or ball) straight forward, stretching your body out as far as you can go. Be sure to contract your core muscles and eliminate any curvature in your lower back to focus the effort on your core muscles. After a pause at the stretched position, start pulling yourself back to the starting position as you breathe out. Repeat for the required number of repetitions.

DAY 5: LOW CAL

Rest or Active Recovery

Your Low-Calorie Day is another opportunity to give your body a break and allow it to recover. After all, the combination of the interval speed burst and full-body metabolic conditioning workouts plus your bodyweight and eccentric strength workouts is more than enough intensity to take on three times a week. Burnout and overtraining occur when you fail to understand the importance of rest and recovery. That’s not to say that you should sit around doing nothing in between workouts. You should certainly be lightly active, walking and doing micromovements throughout the day. (We’ll explore these micromovements in the next chapter.)

The point here is that if you’re exercising effectively, with sufficient loads, your body will be begging for time off and you won’t want to do much more than move slowly for a couple of days afterward. Honor your body by giving it the tender love and care that it requires to repair and bounce back stronger.

CHAPTER
7

STEP 5: REST YOUR WAY TO FASTER FAT LOSS

O
ne day before I wrote this section, I was at the gym getting ready to go through a terrific strength workout—one of my favorites, in fact: deadlifts and kettlebell presses. That’s it. Just those two exercises done for numerous sets with heavy weights, very few reps, and a focus on good tempo for strength development. I did a comprehensive warmup before I started and loosened up my muscles using a foam roller. After a few warmup sets, I added more weight to the bar for my deadlifts, ready to tear into my first set. I felt good, and I distinctly remember visualizing myself performing each rep with ease and perfect form. Then, it happened.

On my third set, as I was lifting 205 pounds—a weight that I could normally deadlift four or five times—I felt a pop. I immediately dropped the weight to the floor and found a way to stand up straight. I couldn’t believe it yesterday, and I can’t believe it now: I tweaked my lower-back muscles—the erector spinae. I’m going to have to take it easy for the next few weeks, modifying any workouts I do to accommodate this injury.

This little accident is serving as inspiration for what I’m about to
write.
It’s very easy to find books and articles on different workout regimens, but far fewer tell you what to do in between workouts. Recovery is just as important as the workouts themselves, as it can prevent these kinds of injuries from happening. Based on this most recent experience, I want to devote a few more pages than I’d originally planned to this very topic.

Getting injured is never fun, but it’s even more annoying when you’ve just started a new workout plan. Imagine if you got a week and a half into this program and strained your hamstring; not only would you not be able to work out, but there’s also a chance you might put on a little more weight than you started with, thus defeating the very purpose of buying this book. We don’t want that to happen! So it’s very important that you learn some clever ways to help your body recover, including gentle ways to keep it moving.

WHY YOU NEED A RECOVERY ROUTINE

As I’ve shared with you, you won’t be exercising every day on this program. It’s simply not productive and may, in fact, be harmful. However, that doesn’t mean you’ll be completely sedentary on your days in between workouts. If you want to avoid the kind of injury I just experienced, and even minimize soreness between workouts, it’s important that you move every day.

I’ll never forget learning about something called creep in my third-year university sports medicine class. According to this concept, solid materials have a tendency to move slowly or deform permanently under the influence of mechanical stresses. In plain English this means that most structures can bend and deform under a certain load after a certain amount of time. And depending on the magnitude of the applied stress and its duration, the deformation may become so large that a component can no longer perform its function.

Try holding a spoon off the edge of a table and placing a 1-pound weight in the spoon. The spoon will quickly bend and deform. If you instead add a lighter load, the spoon might not deform immediately, but given enough time it may end up bent and useless as well. Creep also
applies
to the human body. Sitting at a desk all day, hunched over your computer, is the same as putting weight in the spoon and hanging it off of the table—eventually, your body will deform. Maybe it already has. Take a look around your office, or even the supermarket next time you’re there—I’m sure you’ll notice many people without very good posture.

This is why daily movement is so important. Sitting or even standing in the same position for prolonged periods imposes a load on your muscles and other tissues that, over time, can shift them from their default setting. If you spend most of your time sitting with your legs bent at 90 degrees, then both your hip flexors and hamstrings are spending most of their time in a shortened state. It’s no wonder, then, that flexibility becomes a major issue for so many people.

When you work out, you create trauma within your muscles. This stimulus helps them grow and get stronger. Very often, because the muscles are contracted so heavily in a workout, they can feel stiff for a few days afterward. A number of physiological processes are going on here, but to keep things simple, the more contracted your muscles, the shorter and stiffer they will become. What happens when you flex your biceps? The muscle goes from a lengthened state to a shortened, or concentric, one. If your muscles are constantly shortened due to over-training or prolonged sitting, for example, then they are less likely to regain their natural length.

For instance, too much chest training or prolonged periods of hunched sitting with your shoulders rounded forward will shorten your pectoralis major and minor (chest) muscles. Since one of them (the pec minor) attaches to your collarbone, if it shortens, it will then pull your entire shoulder girdle down and forward. The result is the rounded, hunched shoulders commonly seen in seasoned office workers as well as many male gym rats who obsess about getting a “bigger chest” without doing an appropriate amount of upper back work to counteract the forward pull of the pec minor muscle. So how does this relate to fat loss?

This example illustrates what happens to your body if you sit around all day and expect a few short workouts per week to make up for it. There are 168 hours in a week. If you work out for maybe 3 or 4 of
them,
what are you doing with the rest of that time? Let’s say you spend 60 hours sleeping; that leaves you with 104 waking hours. Maybe 30 or 40 of those hours you’re sitting at your work desk or on the couch, leaving 60 to 70 hours. What should you do with that time to promote fat loss and counteract the effects of all that sitting?

THE IMPORTANCE OF MICROMOVEMENTS

Exercising less with the right intensity is key to losing fat, but so, too, is simply moving your body more on a regular basis. Walk. Take the stairs. Do a few pushups here and there. Do 10 bodyweight squats before you eat. Pick up your kids. Run to the mailbox. Do some lunge walks down the hall. Get up out of your chair every 15 minutes and stretch. All of these micromovements add up over time and can help you burn more calories and avoid turning into the hunchback of Notre Dame. After all, the human body does not become weak and decrepit because of the aging process; it gets that way because we become lazy and fail to provide adequate stimulation for it to continue getting stronger and working at its best.

For instance, it’s been well established that daily exercise such as walking for 30 minutes yields substantial health benefits and that regular physical activity attenuates the health risks associated with overweight and obesity.
¹
In fact, a large 20-year study in Sweden found that, among 7,142 men, those who were most physically active during leisure time had a lower risk of death from heart disease, cancer, and all causes.
²