No more cardio? Well, not exactly. But if you do resistance training correctly, you won’t need to visit that boring treadmill so frequently to keep your abs in good shape.
And I’m not talking about interval cardio, although the weight-training method I mention here (at the end) has an HIIT feel to it. That’s the F4X method, (featured in Old School New Body) which is moderate-weight, high-fatigue training with short rests between sets. It burns more fat and pumps up your muscles a lot too. Here’s the workout:
You take a weight with which you can get 15 reps, but only do 10; rest 30 seconds, then do it again—and so on for four sets. On the fourth set, you go to failure, and if you get 10 reps, you increase the weight on the exercise at your next workout. Observe how those sets are like intervals with short breaks between—you can even step between sets to burn extra calories, but there’s more.
1. While that training style does great things for muscle growth, via myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic expansion, you also get loads of muscle burn. That lactic acid pooling has a spiking effect on your growth hormone output—and GH is a potent fat burner. Fire up muscle burning to get your GH churning (GH also amplifies other anabolic hormones, so it affects both muscle and rippedness).
2. If you do the reps correctly on each set, you’ll also get myofibrillar trauma. The myofibrils are the force-generating strands in muscle fibers. By “damaging” them with slower, controlled negative hits, you force the need for extra energy during recovery. That is, your body runs hotter while you’re out of the gym as it revs to repair the microtears.
To achieve that additional fat-burning trauma, utilize one-second to lift and three-second to lower on all 10 reps of all four sets. On a bench press that’s one second up and three seconds down. It’s the slow lowering that will generate the metabolic momentum after your training (That rep speed will also offer you 40 seconds of tension time on every set, an ideal hypertrophic TUT.)
3. Now if you really desire to get some blubber-busting microtrauma, try your last set of a F4X sequence in X-centric style. That’s one-second to lift and six-second to lower. You may have to decrease the weight, but it will be worth it. Try for eight of those, 56 seconds of tension time, and you should feel the effects the next day. Your muscles will be soring, but it’s a good indication that fat is baking.
F4X for a GH surge, slower negatives for fat-burning micro trauma and X-centric for even more time under tension and fat reduction. It all adds up to faster leanness with less stinginess—because you’ll need less cardio.
Not familiarized with the F4X method? Click Here to get more information about it.