With that said, if you don’t want to take my advice, and instead choose to do crunches anyway, here are the results you can expect from performing hundreds of backbreaking crunches:

1. Zero fat loss.
2. Zero functional core strength.
3. One or more herniated discs.

Nutrition
If you want to lose a little bit of weight, eat a little bit less than you’re eating right now. Simple. If you want to lose a lot of weight, eat a lot less than you’re eating right now. Shouldn’t be particularly difficult.

Exercise
If you want to lose a little bit of weight, slightly increase the amount and/or intensity of exercise you get each week. If you want to lose a lot of weight, significantly increase the amount and/or intensity of exercise you get each week. No problem.

Time
If you say that you don’t time for exercise, I say you are full of shit and need a reality check. There’s absolutely no one on earth who’s so busy they can’t find 10 to 15 minutes of spare time, a few days per week, to exercise. Either wake up 15 minutes earlier three days per week, or better yet, stop doing something else that’s unproductive and replace that with exercise.

Motivation
This is the hardest item on the list to address, but it still shouldn’t be particularly difficult if you go about it the right way. If you have no motivation to exercise, then you probably hate whatever type of exercise you’ve been doing (or avoiding). Find a fitness related activity you enjoy and you won’t need to motivate yourself to do it. People look forward to doing things they enjoy.

Ok, so if nutrition, exercise, time, and motivation aren’t particularly difficult, then what is the hardest part of losing weight, and what is the part that you need to focus on if you want to see any progress towards your weight loss goals? The answer is habits.

Habits
Undoing bad habits and creating good habits is extremely difficult. Eating healthy isn’t hard in and of itself, but if you have a habit of overeating and/or eating unhealthy foods, it can be an unbelievably challenging task to change those habits and start eating healthy.

Same thing for exercise, time, and motivation. None of those aspects of weight loss are particularly difficult, but if you have a habit of not exercising, and you’ve never put much effort into making time for exercise or finding motivating workouts you enjoy, it can be extremely difficult to break those bad habits and replace them with good habits.

So if you’re struggling to lose weight, chances are that you’re concentrating too much on the finer details of nutrition and exercise, and/or you’re using the extremely weak excuse of not having time for exercise, and/or you’re struggling to find the motivation to exercise. Stop worrying about those details and focus simply on replacing your bad habits with good ones.

Lack of time is a bullshit excuse, so don’t bother using it. Lack of motivation probably means you think you need to do boring gym workouts to get in shape. Wrong. Find a fun fitness related activity you enjoy, and start looking forward to your workouts. And don’t sweat the details about nutrition and exercise.

If you make even the smallest changes to your diet and exercise routine, but commit to those changes enough to make them a habit, I guarantee that you’ll see real and lasting weight loss results.

A: Bands or straps.

Q: Resistance bands flat vs. tube?

A: Flat.

Q: Are workouts in fitness magazines bullshit?

A: Yes.

Q: Lebert Equalizers as parallettes?

A: Nope.

Q: Best resistance bands?

A: RBT.

Q: Polycarbonate vs. steel gymnastics rings?

A: Neither, choose wooden rings.

Q: Lebert Equalizer bars how to make?

A: I have no fucking clue.

Q: Is cardio pointless?

A: Hell yes.

Q: Most popular brand of resistance bands?

A: Iron Woody.

Q: How good is the Human Trainer?

A: Really good.

The good news is that you don’t need to do cardio to burn maximum fat and be in fantastic shape. Actually, you’ll burn more fat and be in better shape if you avoid cardio altogether because slow boring cardio is pointless and ineffective for fat loss, and it’s also completely unnecessary towards effectively exercising your heart and lungs, as higher intensity training is significantly more effective cardiovascular exercise.

So if you’re trying to find ways to make cardio less boring, unfortunately that’s impossible, but fortunately you can choose to just stop doing slow boring cardio altogether and do higher intensity circuit training and interval training workouts instead. You’ll burn more fat, be in better shape, and have way more fun with your workouts.

Q: Worst open chain exercise?

A: Leg extensions.

Q: Why is cardio pointless?

A: Because cardio is ineffective at burning fat, great at producing overuse injuries, and might even be making you fatter.

Q: Difference between War Machine and CrossCore180?

A: Nothing.

Q: Why is wall sit pointless?

A: Because the wall sit exercise doesn’t train the lower body as part of a functional unit.

Q: TRX d-rings?

A: They’re on the new TRX Tactical Suspension Trainer, and they’re goddamn cool.

Q: Should i sign a long-term gym contract?

A: Fuck no.

Q: Calorie surplus means?

A: You’re consuming more calories in a day than your maintenance level.

Q: Are full depth squats ever contraindicated?

A: No, not for people with healthy knee function.

Q: How to adjust CrossCore War Machine?

A: Tie a prusik knot.

Q: Tony Horton shirtless?

A: Your wish is my command.

For this blog post, I was going to write in my own words why cardio is making you fatter, but I recently stumbled upon this great video (actually, just an audio recording posted on YouTube) of Paul Chek explaining it way better and more succinctly than I could possibly do:

The key point from Paul’s answer is:

Once you adapt to cardiovascular exercise — in other words, once you’ve done it for any period of time — the metabolic stimulation goes down as you adapt. So after a month of exercise, you’re getting a fraction of the stimulus that you did in your first week.

If you do cardio for a couple of months, eventually your body will adapt and will not be burning anywhere near the same amount of calories as it did when you started, but if you’re still eating the same amount of food (or worse, if you increase the amount of food you’re eating since cardio exercise is proven to increase your appetite), your cardio routine will officially be making you fatter.

A personal trainer who values health and fitness has made it his mission to get fat, but it’s all for a purpose.

Luke Shook, of Omaha, started his journey in December. Shook said his goal was to gain 50 pounds in 12 weeks so he could lose the weight with his clients. [...]

After facing some serious health complications in week 10, Shook knew he had to change his original plan.

“I started getting bloody noses, getting light-headed and stuff, and ended up getting pretty ill for a couple days. So I spoke with everybody involved and decided I should stop at 40 pounds,” Shook said.

Surely there must be more effective ways to motivate the fine people of Omaha get fit.

First, regarding the term “lean muscle”, yes, it’s a really stupid term. “Lean muscle” as opposed to what, “fat muscle”? All muscle is lean. Saying lean muscle is redundant and sounds stupid.

But as I was thinking about this, I began wondering why anyone would use the term “lean muscle” in the first place, and I think I figured out the answer: fat musclemen.

There is no such thing as fat muscle (all muscle is lean), but there is absolutely such thing as fat musclemen (i.e. roly-poly weightlifters and tubby strongman competitors who are very muscular, but also very fat).

If you go to any gym in any city in any country on this fine planet of ours, you’ll see fat musclemen. They’re the guys wearing the weightlifting belt, short shorts, and stringer tank top, and carrying around a 4 litre jug of water.

Fat musclemen are not to be confused with bodybuilders. Bodybuilders are the guys wearing the weightlifting belt, clown pants, and stringer tank top, and carrying around a 4 litre jug of water.

Besides the gym, another great place to spot fat musclemen is in the World’s Strongest Man competitions that are televised on ESPN.

I have a feeling that the reason fitness professionals say they will help you build “lean muscle” is to make it painfully clear that they don’t intend to transform you info a fat muscleman. In other words, they will help you build muscle and lose fat.

So now that I’ve cleared that up, I no longer feel the pressing urge to mock those fitness professionals who use the, albeit stupid, term “lean muscle”.

Sorry, I have no idea how many calories any of my workouts burn. I’ve never worried about trying to track that information for myself, or any of my clients.

The best way to lose weight is to workout regularly, preferably at a high intensity, and make small but maintainable improvements to your diet. They don’t need to be drastic changes. You can start by making small improvements like, say, eliminating pop, cutting down on sweets, reducing portion size, etc. These are simple changes that you can easily maintain.

Don’t stress out about counting calories eaten and trying to estimate how many calories you burn during exercise. That’s a huge pain in the ass and not a habit many people can maintain.

That’s the exact response I sent to the person via YouTube, but I’ll elaborate on some of those points here in this blog post.

First, if you want to lose weight, you should keep in mind that temporary changes in diet will produce a temporary reduction in your weight. Once you return to old habits, you’ll return to your original weight as well. That’s why I think calorie counting is so utterly pointless. Who has the time or interest to count calories every day for the rest of their lives? Certainly not me, and likely not you.

Second, if you want to lose weight, you likely want to see results as fast as possible, and therefore you’re anxious to make drastic changes to your diet to produce rapid results. The problem is that drastic changes are extremely hard to maintain. You’re better off making small changes, trying to maintain those changes, then make some more small changes while still maintaining the previous changes, etc. Over time, many small changes will add up to big changes.

So to summarize, counting calories eaten and/or burned is a huge pain in the ass, so don’t bother doing either. Instead, exercise regularly and improve your diet by making small changes that are maintainable over the long term. If you make one small change to your diet each month this year, and maintain all of those changes, by then end of the year you’ll have a drastic improvement to your diet that’s permanent because you’ll have properly developed the necessary habits to maintain those changes.

So while a low intensity resistance training circuit would need to be 45 minutes to an hour in order to be very effective towards at burning much fat, a high intensity circuit that’s 20 to 30 minutes in length can be extremely effective (more effective than a low-intensity workout that lasts an hour).

Furthermore, if you really take the intensity off the charts and go maximum intensity for 10 to 15 minutes, you can have a killer workout that’s just as effective, if not more so, than a high intensity 20 to 30 minute workout.

So if you want to reduce the amount of time you spend exercising, workout at a higher intensity. Instead of pacing yourself for 45 minutes to an hour, up the intensity and workout harder for 25 minutes, or go balls to the wall for 15 minutes.