Show Time Training Overview
Peak your fat-burning while building some muscle with this 4-week lifting and HIIT training regimen.
Peak your fat-burning while building some muscle with this 4-week lifting and HIIT training regimen.
Welcome to my Show Time Program, a meticulously designed combination of heavy weight, light weight, low reps, high reps, intensity-boosting lifting techniques and HIIT cardio – the sum of which will maximize fat-burning and conditioning while also packing on muscle mass in the span of four weeks. At that point, it will definitely be "Show Time" for your physique!
The gist of the program is that all exercises are done as supersets, with one exercise done with very heavy weight for low reps and the other with light weight for high reps. Typically, the first superset exercise pair of the workout for each muscle group orders the exercises with the heavy one done first and the light one second. The second superset pair, and often the third as well, are done in the reverse order, with the light one going first and the heavy one second.
For many muscle groups, the second exercise pair is done as a pre-exhaust superset with a single-joint (isolation) exercise being performed first with lighter weight and a multijoint exercise being done next with heavy weight. Not only will this setup allow you to build muscle and strength while you drop body fat, but it's all based on cutting-edge research that shows the best ways to burn fat while in the gym.
The use of supersets are supported by research from the College of New Jersey, which showed that resting just 30 seconds between sets burned over 50% more calories during a bench press workout as compared to resting 3 minutes between sets. While supersets theoritcally call for no rest between exercises, it typically takes a good 10-30 seconds to move from one exercise to the next. This will guarantee you're burning at least 50% more calories than you normally would when using traditional straight sets.
The reason I included high-rep sets was to instigate more calorie burning during the workout. The same study mentioned above also found that doing 10-rep sets burned more calories during the workout than did 5-rep sets. This makes sense, as you perform more work when doing more reps. And this is why I jacked the reps all the way up to 30 on some exercises in the final week, which will keep you burning fat through every single workout. This "more work" effect is also the reason why I bumped up the total number of sets performed per workout – to keep you burning more calories each and every week while following Show Time.
While burning calories during the workout is important, even more critical for dropping fat is the number of calories you burn after the workout and how long this post-workout burn lasts. This is known scientifically as EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption). EPOC refers to the fact that after workouts, you take in more oxygen to burn more calories, which is used for recovery purposes. The higher the EPOC,
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