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Barbell Complexs For Fatloss

Burn Calories AND Produce Muscle

My clients frequently ask me for workouts they can do on their own on the days they do not workout with me. Since the main goal of my personal training clients is always to lose body fat and weight, I never prescribe them the traditional cardio workouts that use the elliptical, stationary bike, and treadmill. These are extremely ineffective for anyone looking for fatloss. At the same time, these are also the types of workouts everyone starts to do when they are trying to lose weight.

These workouts are ineffective for 2 reasons:

1) These workouts do not produce any muscle. The more lean muscle you have, the faster your metabolism is and everyone I know wants fast results.

2) They do not elevate your heart rate high enough to burn many calories. How many calories do you think you’re really burning on a stationary bike or jogging on a treadmill? Not many.

Because of these reasons, I recommend my clients to do complexes either as a warmup or an entire workout depending on the amount of weight used.  Complex’s were made popular by Istvan Javorek (Romanian weightlifting coach) in the 1970′s.  A complex, although a rather general term, is when you perform a back-to-back series of exercises, typically using either dumbbells, kettlebells, or barbells, one after another without rest.  The exercise intensity should be taken from the most difficult exercises enabling you to not let go of the weight throughout the circuit.

Why are complexes so good?

Complexes combine the benefits of Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC) and interval training. What EPOC means is the amount of calories you are burning after your wokout. EPOC is always higher when you do resistance training versus when you just do cardio. The reason being, when you are resistance training, you are breaking down your muscles and your body needs more energy to repair itself. Therefore, even though you might burn more calories in the actual hour of a cardio workout than a weight training session, you will burn more calories every hour for the rest of the day when you weight train and this leads to an overall higher calorie burn in a 24 hour window.

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