I first saw this exercise a couple of years ago when I was running my outdoor boot camp program. Other boot camps take place at the same park, and I saw one of those boot camps doing this exercise with their clients. When I first saw this exercise I thought I must have been hallucinating because I figured surely no boot camp instructor could be so stupid as to actually think this is a worthwhile exercise (I was wrong).

I present to you the duck walk:

This is one of the most pointless exercises I’ve ever seen. Please never do this exercise.

If your personal trainer makes you do this exercise, your personal trainer is an idiot (find a new trainer).

If your boot camp instructor makes you do this exercise, your boot camp instructor is an idiot (find a new boot camp).

I never get tired of watching this video. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you need expensive equipment to have a great workout.

After my recent post on how agility ladders are pointless for fat loss, I wasn’t thinking I’d be doing a follow-up post on the same topic so quickly, but Thursday night I heard a story that I can’t resist sharing with you.

If you read my post on agility ladders, I commented on how I recently saw a Vancouver boot camp program doing agility ladder drills with their overweight customers. This is a boot camp that markets itself as a fat-burning exercise program. The idea of having overweight people do agility ladder drills to burn fat is ridiculous.

Anyway, I ranted about it the other night when I wrote that blog post. It felt good getting it off my chest and I figured this was a topic I probably wouldn’t complain about again for a while. Wrong.

So last Thursday night when I arrived at my evening boot camp, one of my customers said she noticed the other Vancouver boot camp program doing agility drills with their customers, and she saw a women have a pretty nasty fall while trying to navigate through a set of agility cones and hurdles the boot camp had setup. This goofy fat-burning agility training workout was taking place on concrete.

I cringe whenever see average men and women doing agility training during a workout designed to produce fat-burning and general fitness. There is absolutely no reason to include those types of drills in a boot camp workout program geared towards burning fat and improved fitness. With average people doing agility training at a fitness boot camp, the risk of injury is high, and agility training is completely pointless for fat loss.

On this list of 10 stress busters, it’s no surprise to see that number 2 on the list is exercise:

2. Exercise a lot. It releases serotonin, which is one of the reasons why it makes people happier (and in turn, less stressed). Exercise is also proven to help with sleep—but only if it’s done at least three hours before bed. It also improves circulation, oxygenates cells, stimulates lymphatic movement, and makes you sweat, ridding the body of toxins.

I’ve been telling my customers this for years:

You can shave pounds at a good rate without sacrificing some of your favorite foods by making swaps in what you are drinking, replacing high-calorie, high-fat and high-sugar drinks with healthier alternatives. Zinczenko provides plenty of alternatives in ”Drink This, Not That!”

A Johns Hopkins University study found that people who cut liquid calories lost more weight but also kept it off longer than people who cut food calories, Zinczenko says.

If we cut beverage calories in half, back to what Americans drank 30 years ago, we could lose more than 23 pounds a year.

As a personal trainer and boot camp instructor, I receive countless questions every day from people who want to know the best way to burn fat and get in shape.

Effective exercise is actually pretty straightforward, but the nutrition side of things (the most important part about burning fat and getting in shape) baffles most people. Thankfully, Harley Pasternak created the 5-Factor Diet.

I’ve read countless diet and nutrition books that confused the hell out of me and provided me with hardly any useful information that I could immediately apply to my day to day diet. What’s most refreshing about Harley’s 5-Factor Diet is that it’s all very straightforward and provides tips that everyone should be able to immediately incorporate into their day to day eating habits.

Here are 5 reasons to love the 5-Factor Diet:

1) Simple. The 5-Factor Diet is based around the simple concept of eating 5 meals per day. Each meal has 5 components (protein, low glycemic carb, essential fat, fiber, sugarless beverage). And every recipe in the 5-Factor Diet book has 5 ingredients and can be made with 5 minutes of prep time. Couldn’t possibly be easier. If you think eating healthy requires a lot of work, you probably haven’t read the 5-Factor Diet.

2) No Gimmicks. Unlike all those fad diets out there that are wasting people’s time and energy without producing any results (not to mention putting their health at risk), Harley’s 5-Factor Diet is completely gimmick-free, and it based around the concept of simply eating the right amounts of all of the most nutritious foods that your body needs to be fit and healthy.

3) Grocery List. One of the best things about Harley’s 5-Factor Diet book is that it takes out all of the guess work from your trip to the grocery store. By including a comprehensive list of “5-Factor Foods”, Harley’s book provides you with a complete list of healthy and nutritious foods that you should pickup from the grocery store. So you’ll no longer find yourself wondering aimlessly through the aisles wondering what foods to pickup. Just print out Harley’s grocery list and take it with you on your next trip to the grocery store.

4) Tasty Recipes. I’ve read countless nutrition and diet books that provide a bunch of theory about how to eat healthy, but don’t provide any info about how to cook tasty and healthy meals. One of the things I love most about Harley’s 5-Factor Diet book is that the entire second half of the book contains healthy and nutrition recipes that taste great and are quick and easy to make.

5) It Works. The 5-Factor Diet produces results. Period. If you want to lose fat and get in shape, pickup the diet book right now and make a commitment to yourself follow Harley’s eating plan for 5 weeks. If you truly follow the 5-Factor Diet, and do a few quality workouts per week, you won’t be disappointed with your results.

And the best part is that after following Harley’s 5-Factor Diet for 5-weeks, you will most likely find that it’s so simple and effective, and you look and feel so much better, you’ll continue your 5-Factor eating habits indefinitely, creating a healthy lifestyle that you can keep up over the long-term.

I just received the following question on my YouTube channel:

What would be the best pushups to target the lower & side pecs?

I posted my answer in the comments for the video in which the question was asked, but I also figured I’d share my answer here because this topic is one of the biggest myths in exercise:

I don’t believe in the theory that you can isolate certain parts of your chest. Flat bench press, incline bench press, and decline bench press all basically work your chest the same way. It’s a myth that you can target your upper/lower, outer/inner pecs. With that said, ask any bodybuilder for advice about this and you’ll surely receive a ridiculous answer about all kinds of silly ways to isolate certain parts of your chest. I think that’s BS, but to each their own.

To summarize, it’s a bodybuilding myth that you have to “hit your muscles from all angles”. Your genetics determine the shape of your chest muscles (and every other muscle on your body), not weird angled chest exercises that bodybuilders claim work the upper/lower and/or inner/outer pecs.

Besides the ineffective jogging and countless useless abdominal crunches, the thing I find most irritating about other Vancouver boot camps is when they use the agility ladder.

I saw a Vancouver boot camp program using the agility ladder with their customers the other night and it made me sad for all the customers that signed up for the program thinking they were going to burn fat and get in shape, only to have their time and effort flushed down the toilet on a drill that has absolutely no place in a fat-burning exercise program.

The problem with the agility ladder is that unless you’ve got the speed and agility of professional athlete, there’s no way you can navigate through the ladder intensely enough to actually produce any significant fat-burning results. You might as well just play hopscotch with your kid because you’ll be getting about the same amount of cardiovascular workout and fat-burning from playing hopscotch as you would from doing agility ladder drills.

Agility ladders should be used by athletes looking to — wait for it — improve their agility. If you’re looking to burn maximum fat with the most time-efficient workouts possible, avoid the agility ladder at all costs.

My mission in the fitness industry is to help people find their perfect workout program. Most people hate exercising, but exercise doesn’t need to be a drag. I think that everyone can find their perfect workout program that they enjoy and that produces amazing fitness results for them.

A complete workout program needs to include at least a couple total-body resistance training workouts per week. There’s no other way to effectively exercise your all of the muscles on your body, and keep your bones and joints healthy. But resistance training shouldn’t be the main exercise focus for most people, for the simple reason that most people don’t like resistance training.

If you don’t enjoy resistance training, you won’t be very consistent with your workouts, and over the long term you’re not very likely to stick with a workout program that’s based almost entirely around that type of exercise.

Most people would be far better off focussing their workouts around activities that they enjoy — activities that can also be considered exercise — and letting the resistance training workouts just be a small part of a much larger fitness lifestyle.

For me, I’ve been focussing about 80% of my exercise program around doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ), and about 20% of my exercise is resistance training done at home (or occasionally at my apartment gym) using a few pieces of inexpensive home exercise equipment. This is the perfect workout program for me because I enjoy my BJJ workouts immensely and look forward to them, and it makes my resistance training workouts much more fun when I only do a couple of total-body circuit training workouts per week instead of focussing my entire workout program around that style of exercise.

If you’re looking for your perfect exercise program, start by finding an activity that you enjoy that’s also a great workout. From there, add in a couple of total-body resistance training workouts per week (preferably not at your local gym, most people hate gyms), and you’ll have what I consider your perfect workout program.

I posted this for one of the members of my Facebook page, but I also figured I’d share it here as well. This is the workout we did this morning at my Vancouver boot camp program.

Warm-Up (30 seconds per exercise):

1. jumping jacks
2. squats
3. lunges
4. butt kicks
5. high jog

Challenge Circuit (30 reps per exercise, do max rounds in 10 minutes):

1. pushups
2. biceps curl + shoulder press
3. squat + row
4. lunge + chest fly
5. jumps

*most of my customers got around 2 rounds in 10 minutes.

Circuit #2 (40 seconds on, 20 seconds off, 2 rounds, 10 minutes)

1. burpees
2. jumping jacks
3. walking lunge + torso twist
4. forward triceps extensions
5. underhand grip row

Circuit #3 (40 seconds on, 20 seconds off, 2 rounds, 10 minutes)

1. runner stance squat jumps
2. jumping jacks
3. alternating split squat jumps
4. low biceps curl
5. high row

Core Challenge Circuit (50 reps per exercise, do max rounds in 10 minutes):

1. mountain climbers
2. front leg raises
3. plank with alternating hand raises
4. side leg raises

*most of my customers got about 1 and a half rounds in 10 minutes.