Most people think that achieving a lean and muscular physique is not possible for them due to the hours upon hours that they will need to spend in the gym each week. Well, that's just not true. I find that effort, not duration has the greatest impact on results. When a client first starts working with me they are generally surprised with how little I have them working out, how much they are eating, and the amount of body fat that is dropping! Train hard, eat well, and get lean!

The basic outline for the week looks like this:

• Monday - Resistance

• Tuesday - Conditioning

• Thursday - Resistance

• Saturday - Conditioning

*Our resistance training sessions are generally 30-50 minutes in length, and the conditioning sessions are 20-40 minutes, so that's around 2 to 3 hours a week, very doable.

For resistance training, I like to start with the aptly named Death Circuits, a form of German Body Comp training that was popularized by the extremely successful Charles Poliquin. German Body Comp is mostly known for its ability to produce fat loss with minimal to no cardio.  There are many forms of it, but the most common is alternating between lower and upper body exercises using short rest periods. Our Death Circuits have us moving from a lower-body quad-dominant exercise to a back exercise, to a lower-body posterior chain exercise, to a chest or shoulder exercise, and then repeating the circuit. This is generally an advanced form of GBC, but I find that for a beginning trainee it is not as taxing as it is for an advanced trainee due to the lighter weights being used, but yet still very effective for fat loss. That's part of what I love about this program, it's great for all levels.

Here's an example of what one of these workouts would look like:

You can of course adjust the exercises, sets, reps, rest periods to increase or decrease difficulty.  This is just an example.

For the conditioning workouts, we will use high-intensity interval training, or HIIT for short. These consist of a short high-intensity bout of exercise followed by a longer low-intensity period. The biggest mistake I see being made with these is the rest period being too short and either far too light or too intense.  This isn't steady-state aerobic work, it's bust your ass for a short time and then recover. Work hard during the high-intensity phase and then rest with what would be a fast walk or a light jog for the low-intensity phase, I will often have clients perform dynamic stretches between high intensity phases to keep them moving while letting their heart rate recover a bit.

I generally don't like to start with too much volume, so maybe just 15 minutes of intervals, not including your warm-up and cool-down. You can add more time each week or workout if you'd like, but if you're doing them right, it shouldn't take long to get a great workout. One of the things I love about these workouts is you can change your intervals pretty much every workout if you'd like, but a great place to start is with either 10 seconds high/120 seconds low x 7-8 sets or 30 seconds high/240 seconds low x 4-5 sets. On paper, these may look easy, but when executed correctly they are brutal.

Here’s a sample 8 week routine you could use:

Time is never a good excuse when it comes to fitness!  You may not be able to workout as much as you'd like, but there is always a way to work it into a busy schedule and still see desired results. Death circuits are great for the busy fitness enthusiast looking to shed some fat and anyone looking for a challenge!