Motivational Speaker

Here’s the challenge.

You want to look amazing and feel great but you don’t have the inclination to mix with the models or beefcakes at the ‘health-club’, you don’t have the million-dollar Mr. Universe home gym and you don’t have the time to spend ten hours a week for the next five years at the local dojo becoming the next Jennifer Garner or Jet Li. Fortunately for you and I, it’s very possible to create a fit, strong, healthy and functional physique without investing countless hours or dollars... but (there’s always a but) you need to know what you’re doing, you need to be consistent and you need have a real crack at it.

You won’t accidentally end up looking like Jennifer Garner by going through the motions or being inconsistent. The right combination of body-weight strength work and cardio exercise in a circuit format might just see you go from flab to fab and huff‘n’puff to buff in no time. The beauty of this type of training is that you need virtually no equipment (if you can’t access a skipping rope any piece of rope will do) and you can do it at home, work, the park, or on holidays – whenever and wherever you like. If the lean athletic look is the one you’re after then this could be the perfect exercise option for you; convenient, free, time-efficient, practical and effective. What more could you want from a workout?

In order to get through the program in 20 minutes you will need to work in a relatively non-stop manner (apart from your transition time); no chat, no toilet breaks and no distractions. If you have no training base and a fitness level of minus eight, then you may want to extend your recovery times and stroll through the program at a more leisurely pace until you’re up to it. So as to avoid brain-fade, the workload for each exercise is time-based (rather than counting reps). Remember each new exercise starts on the minute and the ten-exercise circuit is to be completed twice (thus constituting the 20 minutes).

As you feel yourself getting fitter over the weeks simply increase your work period and decrease your transition time. Depending on your starting point, a program like this could keep

your body adapting for quite a while (months) if you’re consistent and if you graduate the intensity and workload over time. Eventually you will need to change the exercises and format to keep your body adapting but you can keep using the same principle (circuit-based training) for as long as you like.

The work / rest ratios for the various fitness levels are as follows:

So, if for example, you decide that you’re at an intermediate level then you would work for 30 seconds and have a transition (recovery) time of 30 seconds for the duration of the program. You may need to modify some exercises to suit your fitness and strength level (for eg. do half push-ups). This program could be done every day but it is probably advisable to alternate this program with a cardio workout (run, ride, swim, etc.) day.

No more excuses now, enjoy!