In order to lose body fat you need to burn fatty acids by doing workouts that have a high metabolic cost. One great way to do that is to add finishers to your workouts 3-4 days per week.
Hormone-sensitive lipase is crucial for inducing this process because it mobilizes free fatty acids from adipose tissue, releasing nasty fat into the blood stream. Then, carnitine transports the free fatty acids into the mitochondria where they can be burned for energy.
This is the main thing that people are confused about when it comes to exercise and fat loss. You need to produce a tough metabolic cost in order for this process to happen. Jogging, yoga, and other low-intensity activities just don’t do this.
What does produce a high metabolic cost is intense exercise. Or, more specifically, intense exercises or combinations of intense exercises that stimulate all the major muscle groups. This type of training induces the highest metabolic costs possible. And your stinging lungs and burning muscle bellies will be evidence enough of that fact after you’ve had a dose of these three workouts.
Behold, The Finisher
Putting a combination of exercises that last about 5-10 minutes at the end of a sound strength training workout is perfect since your energy stores are low. Particularly, your glycogen stores are low, putting your stored fat front and center as your primary fuel source. A good finisher will help produce great fat loss and it nails the demand for energy at this point in the workout. Remember hormone-sensitive lipase? This will be called upon in the adipocytes in order to provide energy.
You’ll also be training fatigued, which has the added benefit of building mental toughness. If done correctly, you will have nothing left in the tank at the end. This is crucial if you want to produce results. If you feel a little bit of nausea and exhaustion, you can be sure you turned on your fat burning engine.
A good finisher is not haphazardly thrown together either – it needs to be challenging and realistic. It makes no sense to injure yourself or perform poor quality movements. You will notice that we prescribe exercises that don’t take a ton of skill or coordination. Foundational movements such as deadlifts and Olympic lifts should be reserved for the beginning of a workout, when you are fresh and can load the bar with appreciable amounts of weight. This doesn’t mean that they can’t ever be used as finishers but their greatest benefits are had by hard training early.
See the moves on next page
1. Sled Push/Pull
If you have access to a sled, you are in prime position to scorch bodyfat in a way that doesn’t require a treadmill. The neat thing about this finisher is that it can be scaled for a variety of fitness levels. In the end, you need to be honest with yourself and load it with as much weight as possible where pushing it and pulling it for 20 meters each becomes very difficult.
How To: Simply push the sled as fast as possible for 20 meters, then pull it back by dragging it while walking backwards with good posture for the same distance. Repeat as many times as you can for five minutes. Add one minute each week of training until you reach 10 minutes. At that time, add more weight and repeat the cycle.
2. Kettlebell Swing + Burpee Countdown
Even if you’re not a big fan of kettlebell swings, you’re probably a big fan of their ability to boost your body’s power, work capacity and fat-burning. Burpees, on the other hand…burpees are the devil. But there’s still a lot to be desired, and for all the same reasons. And putting the two together for a few minutes at the end of your workout holds tremendous get-lean potential.
How To: You will perform a superset of kettlebell swings and burpees. You will start out performing 10 kettlebell swings and then 10 burpees. From there you go down to 9, then 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 rep of each. Go as fast as possible and record your time to beat the next session.
3. Dumbbell Complex
One set of dumbbells, hundreds of calories scorched, under 10 minutes invested. Using a single set of dumbbells to attack different muscle groups at the end of a workout can be incredibly productive for releasing stubborn bodyfat, particularly if you put together the right exercises.
How To: Using one set of dumbbells, you’ll moveperform five exercises for the prescribed number of reps without putting the weights down. After you complete the each round, rest no more than two minutes. Repeat for three rounds total. Picking the correct weight for this complex can be tricky. The snatch and the bent-over row will usually be the deciding factors when it comes to picking the weight. Try selecting dumbbells that allow you to perform snatches for eight reps or a bent-over row for eight reps.
