With summer on the horizon, it’s pretty safe to assume that your desire to burn excess fat is at its peak. Even though your nutrition plan is the primarily stimulus for getting leaner, there are simple workout modifications to augment fat loss. Indeed, when you need to figure out how to get ripped in the shortest time possible, finishers will do the trick.

A finisher is an exercise that stimulates as many major muscle groups as possible for minutes at a time. And just like the name implies, a finisher should be performed after your regular workout is done. There are two reasons why a finisher really should be at the end of a workout.

First, after a sufficient strength training workout your available energy stores are lower than normal. This is a perfect time to ramp up your need for energy as your metabolism stimulates hormone-sensitive lipase in adipocytes. Hormone-sensitive lipase is an enzyme that converts triglycerides into free fatty acids that enter the blood and bind to albumin for delivery to exercising muscle (Nadel, Medical Physiology, 2003).

Second, in order to maximize the uptake of free fatty acids and growth hormone release, the finisher should be exhausting. In fact, a finisher should be – dare I say – nauseating. Even though exercise should never make you ill, a fleeting feeling of nausea means you’ve accumulated protons and acidified skeletal muscle to create a strong stimulus for growth hormone release. Put another way: if you do a finisher correctly you won’t want to do anything afterward.

Here are three of my favorite finishers that will fit well into any training plan:

Squat/Curl/Push Press Combo

How to do it: while standing, hold a dumbbell in each hand, arms hanging at sides, with your feet shoulder width apart. Push your hips back and squat down until the dumbbells are at mid-shin level on the outside of your legs. Stand as you simultaneously curl the dumbbells. At the top position of the curl, press the dumbbells overhead using leg drive. Lower the dumbbells to the starting position and repeat.

Duration: perform as many fast reps as possible for two minutes straight. Then rest for one minute and repeat another two-minute set with lighter weights.

Progression: make a note of how many reps you achieve in each two-minute set with a specific weight. Aim to increase the number of total reps in each set for your next workout.

Kettlebell Swing/Clap Push-up Combo

How to do it: start with 20 explosive KB swings, then immediately drop to the ground and do 10 clap push-ups. Next do 18 swings and 9 clap push-ups, followed by 16 swings and 8 clap push-ups. Continue with this sequence until you reach two swings and one clap push-up. Rest for 60 seconds, then do another sequence where you start at 10 swings and 5 clap push-ups and continue until you reach two swings and one clap push-up.

Progression: reduce the 60 seconds rest period by five seconds every other workout. Work your way down to 10 seconds of rest.

Goblet Squat/Pull-up Combo

How to do it: start with 20 goblet squats, then immediately do 10 pull-ups. Next do 18 goblet squats and 9 pull-ups, followed by 16 squats and 8 pull-ups. Continue with this sequence until you reach two squats and one pull-up. Rest for 60 seconds, then do another sequence where you start at 10 squats and 5 pull-ups and continue until you reach two squats and one pull-up.

Progression: reduce the 60 seconds rest period by five seconds every other workout. Work your way down to 10 seconds of rest.

There are no stringent rules for creating a finisher workout. For example, if you don’t have the strength to do that many pull-ups you can reduce the reps to match your strength levels. The key is to keep moving quickly between exercises for a few minutes straight to induce a full-body training effect.

In terms of frequency, these finishers can be performed 3-4 times per week or however best fits your training schedule.

It’s imperative that you move through the finisher workouts as fast as possible in order to maximize the metabolic cost of the session. These finishers are also excellent as stand-alone, extra workouts to increase your weekly training frequency.

Stay Focused,
CW

Today I want to address one of the most important aspects of recovery: quality sleep. Here’s a question I recently received from a reader.

Question: Hi Chad, I purchased your HFT program and I’m wondering if I should modify the workouts to take into account high stress and poor periods of sleep? I have a stressful job and two young toddlers so sleep is often less than perfect on a weekly basis. Thanks, Matt

Answer: Matt, I feel your pain. I’m not someone who functions well on less than eight hours of sleep, and I rarely reach that coveted goal these days. Oftentimes my athletes can’t get a full eight hours due to travel and schedule demands, so I had to find a way to make the most of their sleep time.

The key is to maximize however much sleep you can get. Six hours of high-quality, restful sleep is more beneficial than eight hours spent tossing and turning.

So before I answer your original question about manipulating the HFT workouts to meet your sleep insufficiency, I want to outline my three top tips for improving the quality of your sleep.

1. Take Vitamin C and magnesium before bed: Magnesium is a powerful mineral that helps relax the central nervous system, and Vitamin C lowers cortisol. The combined effect helps you quickly feel drowsy, and then it helps you remain asleep.

The best concoction I’ve found for improving sleep quality is with a combination of Vitamin C and magnesium. But just any old Vitamin C/magnesium combo won’t work since neither nutrient is easy for the body to assimilate in regular supplement form. You need a high-quality version of each nutrient to get the job done.

My clients and I use Lypospheric Vitamin C and Mineralife Magnesium 15 minutes before bed. Mix the two nutrients in a few ounces of water and shoot it down like a shot of tequila. It tastes terrible so don’t let it sit in your mouth.

2. Sleep in a cool room: Research demonstrates that the optimal room temperature for sleep is between 60-68 degrees Fahrenheit. This temperature range lowers your core body temperature which helps you feel sleepier. It’s important to lower your temperature because an elevated core temperature is one physiological mechanism associated with the wake cycle. People with insomnia typically have a higher pre-bedtime core temperature.

3. Sleep in a pitch black room: The tiniest bit of light can have a negative effect on your sleep quality by reducing melatonin. There’s a small region of your brain within the hypothalamus called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) that controls all aspects related to the sleep/wake cycle, including melatonin production.

When your body senses light, the SCN turns on physiological processes related to the wake cycle: it stops melatonin production, and increases cortisol and core body temperature. Since those three factors are related to the wake cycle, you obviously want to minimize them by keeping your bedroom pitch black.

Now, back to the original question: Should you manipulate the HFT parameters when you can’t get adequate sleep?

Yes, and this applies to any training program you’re on. When you feel rundown, you should decrease the intensity of all the sets. This could mean either lowering the training loads by 20-30% or stopping each body weight exercise an extra rep or two sooner than normal.

In extreme cases, it never hurts to take an extra day off. But in most instances, just going through the motions will actually help you sleep better that night since there’s a strong, positive correlation between exercise and sleep quality. This is true even when your workouts aren’t up to par.

And speaking of HFT, I recently did a 45-minute interview with Dr. Lonnie Lowery’s Iron Radio podcast where I discuss the mechanisms, observations, and science behind my HFT protocols.

You can listen to my interview at Iron Radio.

Stay Focused,
CW

I recently received a question from a reader about training frequency. He had such great success building muscle on my High Frequency Training (HFT) program that it changed his views regarding the dogma between training frequency and recovery. While most traditional training programs have you train a muscle group or movement 2-3 times per week, HFT doubles or triples that amount.

How’s it possible to train so frequently without overwhelming your capacity to recover? Because the intensity of each workout changes over the weeks and months. Not every exercise of every workout is taken to maximum intensity and exhaustion. Since I released HFT last fall I’ve received a handful of emails from people who wondered why I didn’t go into greater detail about progression plans for the 12-week full-body program.

The reason? Because the periodization and progressions are built into the program. Some workouts are intentionally more demanding than others. And some exercises for, say, the upper back might be difficult on Monday but less intense on Tuesday. That’s how it should be. It’s this frequent shift in intensity and volume that allows your physiology to adapt to the high-frequency recovery demands over the course of 12 weeks.

To derive the best muscle-building results from my HFT program, all you have to do is follow the set/rep guidelines of each workout. The progression and periodization aspects automatically fall into place because they’re built into the program.

Now, back to my reader’s question regarding training frequency. He wanted to know how many times per week he could perform the rings dip. Before I answer that question, I should state here that my HFT program shouldn’t be changed. Don’t add extra work because the program already pushes the limits of frequency and recovery.

With that in mind, there’s not much limit to how frequently you can perform a movement if the loading and intensity are minimal. However, the frequency limitations become paramount when you train with heavy loads.

Powerlifters usually train with near-maximal loads for the squat, bench press and deadlift, and this requires days of recovery between workouts. That’s why maximal load training and HFT don’t mix. The combination would degrade your joints and overwhelm the CNS. Olympic lifters in the eastern bloc European countries have been known to work up to 10 heavy sessions per week, but it’s safe to postulate that their joints eventually suffer because of it.

Here are my guidelines for increasing the frequency of an exercise:

1. Don’t increase everything at once: it’s easy for a skinny guy to think that tripling the frequency of all his exercises will make him grow fast. Actually, it’ll just leading to overtraining and joint dysfunction. Focus on the body part or movement that needs the most help. You can’t squat heavy every day, but you can do the goblet squat with submaximal loads each day.

2. Limit the volume/intensity of the extra workouts: if you want to build upper back and arm mass with more frequent pull-up workouts, start with a volume/intensity that’s easy to manage. Initially, do less than you think you need for the extra workouts.

3. Choose exercises that allow unrestricted movement patterns: gymnastics rings allow for fully unrestricted movement, and that’s why they’re ideal for HFT upper body exercises. Just because convicts perform daily pull-ups from a fixed bar doesn’t mean it’s the ideal approach. They work with what they’re given and they probably have the joint dysfunctions to prove it. The best rings I’ve found for the money can be found from CFF at this link.

Here’s a simple exercise pairing to add more full-body mass:

Frequency: every other day for the first week.
Progression: add an extra day each week until you reach 7 days.
Loading/intensity: use a moderate load and stop 2 reps short of failure with each set.

1A Goblet squat for 5 reps
Rest 15-30 seconds
1B Pull-up from rings or hammer grip for 5 reps
Rest 15-30 seconds, repeat 1A-1B for six rounds (30 total reps of each)

For more detailed guidelines on how to use HFT to build muscle and movements, click the banner below…

Stay Focused,
CW