Burn More Calories In 30 Minutes

Burn Calories AND Produce Muscle

My clients frequently ask me for workouts they can do on their own on the days they do not workout with me.  Since the main goal of my personal training clients is always to lose body fat and weight, I never prescribe them the traditional cardio workouts that use the elliptical, stationary bike, and treadmill. These are extremely ineffective for anyone looking for fat loss. At the same time, these are also the types of workouts everyone starts to do when they are trying to lose weight.

These workouts are ineffective for two reasons:

1. These workouts do not produce any muscle. The more lean muscle you have, the faster your metabolism is and everyone I know wants fast results.
2. They do not elevate your heart rate high enough to burn many calories. How many calories do you think you’re really burning on a stationary bike or jogging on a treadmill? Not many.

Because of these reasons, I recommend my clients to do complexes. A complex can be done with body weight, dumbbells, kettlebells, or a barbell. It is 5 exercises (it can be any number that is taxing but I mostly stick with 5) that are performed back to back with no rest until the 5 are completed.  Once done, I give my clients a 2-3 minute break and then they repeat the complex 4-5 times.

Why are complexes so good?

Complexes combine the benefits of Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC) and interval training.  What EPOC means is the amount of calories you are burning after your wokout. EPOC is always higher when you do resistance training versus when you just do cardio. The reason being, when you are resistance training, you are breaking down your muscles and your body needs more energy to repair itself.  Therefore, even though you might burn more calories in the actual hour of a cardio workout than a weight training session, you will burn more calories every hour for the rest of the day when you weight train and this leads to an overall higher calorie burn in a 24 hour window.

Interval training is great for fatloss because interval workouts elevate your heart rate to a certain point that will make you burn a ton of calories in that cardio workout.  Interval work is done at an anaerobic level (out of breath).

By combining both of these result-driven training methods, you will experience a workout that will leave you wiped out, but feeling really good when it’s over. The best part is how effective these short workouts are at getting rid of body fat.

The featured video is of a Barbell Complex performed by me. In the video I am doing the follow exercises in the order that they appear: Romanian Deadlift, Shrug, Hang Clean, Overhead Press, Upright Row, Snatch, Tricep Extension , Bicep Curl , Reverse Lunge

As you can tell by the video, complexes are a very quick and effective way to burn a ton of calories while simultaneously producing muscle.