The Russian Fat Loss Secret: Guest Post

A couple of months ago I met Jose on a trip to Honduras and we are now good friends. Jose is General Manager of a well-known hotel chain in Atlanta and, like me, he loves to travel and see all the world has to offer. As we smoked cigars and enjoyed the beautiful country of Honduras, Jose shared his biggest fear with me. Approaching 50 years of age, Jose is 50lbs over weight and struggles with his energy levels. Like many over weight people, what frustrated Jose most was the lack of understanding why, after years of being in decent shape, his body was now giving way to love handles, a gut and a feeling of labor just to get up in the morning.

Jose, like many people who reach their mid-thirties is experience a natural blockage of his system that comes from four things:

1) lack of exercise;

2) a build up of toxins from the food he eats, the air he breaths and a myriad of other exposures to foreign toxins that enter the body;

3) a lack of sufficient nutrition, enzymes and vitamins the body needs to function properly;

4) his body’s unique deficiency rate which is basically how it reacts to the three points above.

In 2003-4 I weighed 355lbs. I was heading for an early grave and what bothered me the most is I didn’t really understand why. I knew I didn’t exercise regularly, but I also wasn’t an over eater. In fact, I ate less in volume than most people I knew, yet here I was going from pant size to pant size every 6 to 9 months and not understanding what the hell is going on. If I knew then what I know now, I would have been able to address my weight issue effectively when I was 30 years old.

Luckily, fate and a little initiative led me to finding a path that has changed my life. In 2008 I was introduced to a nutritional cleanse system called Isagenix, and after watching a 300lb 50 year old Doctor lose 90lbs in 120 days, I decided to give it a try. I’ll spare you the details and get to the results. In 30 days I lost 25lbs. In 90 days I was down almost 60lbs and had such high energy levels I was back in the gym for the first time in over 8 years. After 90 days I got off the system and went into a “maintenance mode”, eating normally, exercising, yet still cleansing every 2 to 3 weeks. After a year on the program I was down over 100lbs.

Today I am at a stable 225lbs, down from a high of 355lbs. A year ago I had gone all the way down to 196lbs, a result of running between 18 and 23 miles a week. At 196lbs I didn’t feel that great, I had lost all muscle mass and knew I was fairly weak. So I changes my training regimen and opted for more weight training and plyometric exercises, less long distance running. I am in the gym 2 to 3 times a week now, and go for a couple of 2-mile runs a week. This has helped me maintain a weight of 225lbs yet get all my strength back. I feel better than I have ever felt in my life.

Jose got on Isagenix 30 days ago and is already down 25lbs. He wants to lose another 25lbs and hold his weight at 250lbs. I meet people all the time who struggle with their weight and their health. Its not just overweight people, its also hard working professionals who are low on energy, don’t exercise regularly, don’t feel good. Yet they are not sure what to do. I have personally introduced over 15 people to Dr. Joe, the Doctor who guided me through the process. Most of them have seen similar results to Jose and I. A few didn’t, but that’s their own doing. If you want something bad enough you can achieve it.

Many people unfortunately see temporary results as a yield of dieting. They cut their calories and of course lose weight. But they don’t really understand why they have lost weight and why their body gains the weight back with a vengeance. It goes back to the secret formula of exercise, toxin build-up, lack of nutrition, enzymes and vitamins, and accepting that your unique body is prone to weight gain with age.

While a program like Isagenix can help you address points 2 and 3 (and you need to understand the science and logic behind these two), you have to also exercise. And the secret to exercising is to make it fit into your life, not make your life fit around exercise. It’s a crucial factor that many people refuse to understand, even professional trainers who design 5 day a week training programs for average people who will never be able to stick to them. So as I was scanning the many headlines this past week, I came across a must-read article that nicely describes why a 50 year old like Jose can make a significant life-change with exercise and nutrition in less than 30 days.

If any of you want to learn more about Isagenix I’m happy to introduce you to Dr. Joe and let him tell you about the science behind it and why it has worked for so many people like Jose and I. But to address the exercise question, I’m happy to share this incredible guest post by Bill Hartman. Enter Bill…

The Russian Fat Loss Secret
Learn the proven way to sculpt a lean, muscular body

By Bill Hartman, P.T., C.S.C.S.
12 May, 2011

Ever hear the adage, “Train like an athlete to look like an athlete?” It’s a popular mantra among strength coaches today, since it encourages folks to focus on total-body strength and all-around fitness—instead of just lying on the floor doing crunches. 



But there’s been one downside: Plenty of guys have asked me what how to do “two-a-days”—as in two workouts per day. This is usually because they read that this is what some sculpted world-class athlete does. 



My answer: If your goal is to lose fat and build muscle, you don’t need two-a-days. In fact, two-a-days would actually be too much training for the average person. (Even in the unlikely scenario that you had the time.) The truth is, even the best athletes don’t thrive on two-a-day workouts. 



To understand why, I’ll need to give you a bit of history lesson. But by the time I finish, I will have revealed the training secrets that have built some of the best athletes in the world. And these same secrets will turn your body into a fat-burning machine. 



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Here in the United States, we’re a melting pot of different cultures. This gives us a diverse gene pool that produces amazing genetic freaks—who can run faster, jump higher, and throw harder than almost anyone in the world. 



Now those of us in the fitness industry would like to attribute these athletes’ performances to our superior training methods. But that’s rarely the case. In America, strength coaches frequently overtrain many of our best young athletes, pushing them to exhaustion with hours and hours of intense training. So in the end, the athletes who break records are most often the ones who are so physically gifted that they can thrive at their sports in spite of these extreme training methods. Not because of them.

Of course, if longer and more frequent workouts aren’t the answer, what is? Well, you’ve heard the phrase work smarter, not harder, right? That’s the solution. And turns out, some fitness experts have known exactly what to do for a very long time.

Let me explain: Before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians lacked genetic diversity because they were a closed society. So what did Russian sports scientists do? They carefully studied and analyzed fitness performance until they discovered the best way to train athletes. The result: Some of the greatest athletic performances on the planet.

Don’t believe me? I have proof.

Back in 1984, the Russians and other Eastern-bloc countries decided to boycott the summer Olympics. So their athletes participated in an “alternative Olympics,” called the Friendship Games. And when the two competitions were over, it was clear that the Russian sports scientists really knew how to develop great athletes.

To give you perspective, 140 countries participated in the Olympics, while approximately 50 nations competed at the Friendship Games. Nevertheless, the Friendship Games athletes outperformed the Olympic Games sportsmen in 20 of 41 track and field events. In fact, a bunch of Olympic gold medalists wouldn’t have even placed in many of the events since more than 60 Friendship Game results were good enough to secure medals at the Olympics. The Russians broke numerous world records and would have been some of the top Olympians in weightlifting and wrestling. In other words, the Russian athletes were better prepared and better trained. Period.

Now, the secrets that I’m about to give you are based on a small piece of this Russian sports science. They’re not really secrets anymore, but principles. And I use them with many athletes at my private training facility, IFAST, in Indianapolis. The results have been beyond impressive. Not only have our athletes’ performances improved tremendously, but these clients have become even leaner—without trying. What could be better than that?

The Science Behind The Russian Fat Loss Secret

A quick biology lesson: Your muscles are composed of fast-twitch fibers and slow-twitch fibers. Heavy strength training targets the fast-twitch fibers and, of course, helps to build muscle. But it doesn’t do a lot for your slow-twitch fibers.

Endurance-based training, on the other hand, targets your slow-twitch fibers and ignites fat loss. But as just about any longtime runner can tell you, it doesn’t help you pack on muscle.

Which prompts a seemingly obvious solution: Why not combine training methods and achieve the best of the both modes?

Enter what I call The Russian Fat Loss Secret: a strength-aerobic workout that targets both your fast-twitch and your slow-twitch muscle fibers. This is the same strategy used by Russian sports scientists decades ago. So you build muscle and strength, burn fat, and improve your total-body fitness fast.

The best part: It couldn’t be simpler. For example, each workout contains heavy-lifting and explosive exercises. These movements are designed to hit your fast-twitch muscles, which have the greatest potential for size and strength gains. They’ve also been shown to require more energy to contract than slow-twitch fibers, providing an additional benefit.

To train your slow-twitch fibers, I prescribe “tempo” exercises within each workout. The idea is to perform an exercise at a slow but steady tempo from start to finish. I’ll use the “barbell tempo squat” as an example. This is simply a barbell squat in which you take two seconds to lower the weight, and 2 seconds to lift the weight—all without pausing at the top or the bottom of the exercise. One important point: You’ll have to lower the load—a lot—for these tempo moves. Too much weight and you’ll still be focused on your fast-twitch fibers, which won’t give you all the benefits of this combo approach.

But here’s why tempo exercises work. When doing the barbell tempo squat, for example, your legs are under constant, low-level tension. This reduces the blood flow to your working muscles, depriving them of oxygen for an extended period of time. With less oxygen, your muscles react by creating more mitochondria. Mitochondria are tiny powerhouses in your muscle cells that produce energy.

So the more mitochondria you have, the more energy you can produce. And the more energy you can produce, the harder and the longer you can exercise before you run out of gas.

Now, can you guess what mitochondria like to use to produce this energy? Body fat. That’s right: The more mitochondria you have; the more fat you can burn.

There’s one last key piece to this puzzle. To end each workout, I include an intense “metabolic accelerator,” such as the kettlebell jump or kettlebell swing. These are power exercises that you do quickly for about 10 seconds, interspersed with about 50 seconds of rest. So it’s sort of like doing eight to ten 100-yard sprint intervals, but without the need for a track. That means they’re great for burning calories and boosting your post-workout metabolism, which results in even greater fat loss.

The upshot: By following the strength-aerobic principles of The Russian Fat Loss Secret, you’ll get the muscle-sculpting benefits of heavy lifting and the fat-loss benefits of endurance-based training. What’s more, you can achieve fantastic results in just three workouts a week. Now doesn’t that sound a lot better than two-a-days?

Want to try it? The Russian Fat Loss Workout is available exclusively on Men’s Health Personal Trainer. There you’ll find Hartman’s complete four-week plan, and have access to our customizable nutrition program—which will help you create the best diet for your goals, lifestyle, and preferences. Click here to learn more!