Chris Powell's Choose More, Lose More for Life (33 page)

To vary your 9-Minute Missions even more, I’ve
randomized
the order in which you use the different protocols. This means that each day you’ll be exercising your muscle groups, or your total body, according to a different protocol. Each week of the month, the protocols and body zones get switched around, so no week is the same. This keeps your muscles guessing about what kind of stimulation’s coming next, so they can’t adapt to a routine. It’ll make your fitness surge!

Here’s your monthly schedule. Go for it!

Nutrition is the first building block of carb cycling, alternating days of high-carb and low-carb intake to continually stoke your metabolism to extreme heat. Muscle development and maintenance is the second building block, using 9-Minute Missions to keep your muscles chomping right through carbs and fat.
Accelerating calorie burn
beyond that is the third building block: cardiovascular workouts called Shredders, which melt even more fat off your body. Shredders maximize your calorie use so you incinerate 200, 400, 800—maybe even 1,000 more calories a day than you would without them! This means faster weight loss: Shredders are
accelerators
.

Shredders are
daily
workouts: You do them five days a week, on both high-carb and low-carb days. On high-carb days, you’ve got more fuel and more energy, so you can really attack your Shredders and send your metabolism into overdrive. On low-carb days, your body can’t get its energy from carbs, so it demolishes fat!

You want to lose weight faster, right? It’s something you want to do
for yourself
, so absolutely carve out Shredder time in your daily schedule. You can do your Shredders anytime—after breakfast, in the afternoon, in the evening—whatever works with your schedule. And make sure to do them five days a week!

Shredders put your body in motion and get your heart pumping—that’s what
cardiovascular
(sometimes called aerobic) exercise is. Walking, jumping rope, swimming, etc.—cardio increases your
cardiorespiratory
fitness, the performance of your body’s circulatory (blood) and respiratory (breathing) systems, which supply oxygen to your muscles. The goal is to move your muscles and raise your heart rate for a prolonged period of time. With each and every muscle contraction, your body incinerates calories.

The longer you move, the more calories you burn. Shredders aren’t
super-quick, high-intensity workouts like 9-Minute Missions: They’re longer and less intense. Longer workouts? Don’t worry! To lose weight,
you don’t have to run for hours
on a treadmill or chug away on an elliptical machine till your mind goes numb. I promised I’d help you get you to your weight-loss goals in the least amount of time with the least amount of effort, and I keep my promises. So I’ve combined two powerful training principles into one incredibly effective, efficient fat-burning workout: the Shredder.

Remember, your body’s designed to adapt to absolutely anything, including exercise. When your body adapts to your workout, it’ll
get less out of the exercise
. It knows the drill and goes through the motions on autopilot, without making much of an effort. To accelerate your weight loss and keep it going like lightning, you’ve got to play tricks on your body! Shredders do that in two ways.

Trainers like me—and scientists, too—know that if you do an exercise, say stair-climbing, at a single level of intensity from start to finish, it has a lot less cardio and fat burning impact than if you vary your level of exertion during the exercise. That’s why people who are serious about fitness use
interval training
. And that’s why Shredders do, too. The technique is simple: You start an exercise at low intensity, kick up to high intensity for a few seconds to a minute or two, then drop back down to low intensity. And repeat. Get it? You’re exercising in intervals!

By cycling through high-intensity and low-intensity action, Shredders fake your body out: It has to keep responding to
unpredictable messages
, so it can’t slow down. The constant activity of an exercise such as bicycling cranks up your metabolism for all-out carbohydrate burning. And it keeps your body at that peak for a long time after your workout—this is called metabolic after-burn. Interval training makes your workout the best fat-burner it can be!

Here’s something really cool, even though it’s kind of a training bummer: It only takes about five to six times of doing the same workout for your body to begin to adapt to it. Five to six times! After that your body won’t consume as many calories during that workout, and you’ll get less fat-burning bang for your time and effort bucks. But you can sneak around this with something that I’ve built into Shredders:
progressive overload
. It’s a tactic that steps up your cardio training every several workouts—pretty much once a week. Your Shredder workout constantly evolves, so it keeps working for you. It keeps accelerating fat loss, smashing through your weight-loss plateaus, and getting the results you want!

Progressive overload targets three of the four aspects of exercise:
intensity
,
time
, and
type
. (The other aspect is frequency—how often you exercise—but you’re always going to Shred five times a week.) Each week, you’ll bump up one of these three.

When you exercise, there are a bunch of markers that indicate your fitness level. You sense that your heart rate speeds up. You feel the burn in your muscles. You notice that you breathe faster. That last bit of information is an especially good indicator of your fitness level. You can use it to measure something called
perceived exertion
(PE). This technique is also called the
talk test
, because it judges how much effort it takes for you to exercise based on your ability to talk while working out. The fitter you are, the less effort you exert while doing a particular exercise!

There are all kinds of technology out there that measure your exertion level, from smartphone apps to heart rate monitors, but this basic talk test is one of the fastest and easiest (
and cheapest!
) ways to roughly gauge your exercise intensity any given moment!

Do the talk test and use this PE chart to determine the exercise intensity levels you reach while doing your Shredders. As the duration of your Shredders changes from week to week, so will your intensity. Sometimes you’ll Shred between levels 6 and 7, and sometimes you’ll Shred between levels 6 and 10!

The beauty of using the PE scale is that you can watch your PE go down as your fitness increases. For example, a light jog might be a level 8
on your scale now, but in a few weeks, it might fall to level 6. And you might hit level 8 only when you’re running. You have to
move faster
to hit your intensity targets… but harder work won’t feel any different than the lighter work you started with! Before you know it, your friends will have to sprint to keep up with you!