Jim:   You talk about more multi-joint movements; more big movements.  How do these big movements help boost metabolism and burn fat?

Michael:    There are actually a couple of things here.  A lot of the big movements indirectly work your abs and more importantly, the big movements are what really changes your body’s metabolism and burns the most calories; stimulates your fat burning and muscle building hormones.  All of that is so much more important than just trying to target your abdominals.

I do include in my programs a little bit of direct ab exercises, but really 95% of my programs are based around multi-joint full body movements that really change your whole body.  Once people get this, you see the results fast because I remember working with people in the past where I would see them for months and months every day in the gym on the ab mat.  They would be on the ab mat for a half hour doing eight different variations of crunches and ten different variations of leg lifts.

To be honest, I spend about two minutes on my abs.  99% of my workout is these big full body movements like squats and dead lifts and snatches and Cuban presses and stuff like that – lunges; any upper body pressing or pulling; things where you are using most of your body’s musculature instead of just your abs.  I think that’s such an important concept to grasp.

Jim:    What you’re saying and you’ve seen this is that literally you can change your metabolism and that a lot of the way to do it is actually doing these big movements.  I don’t know if you can go into this a little bit because I’m a little new to this idea, but how do those movements affect your body physiologically where it helps to burn fat?

Michael:    Consider this – let’s throw out an example and say that you have a 20 minute workout to do.  Well the typical person if they had to choose a workout and they want to lose stomach fat and get six pack abs will choose to do crunches, leg lifts, leg raises, side bends, torso twists – things like that that are all ab and core exercises.

They haven’t done a whole lot in reality.  At the end of those 20 minutes, maybe you burned a few calories.  Maybe you worked your abs pretty hard.  They might be sore the next day.  They might feel like you actually did something.

But instead of that, let’s forget about all ab exercises.  For that 20 minutes, and I’m not saying this is an ideal workout or anything.  I’m just giving an example since you asked the question about the different in how it affects your body.  Instead of that, let’s spend those 20 minutes doing nothing but squats, lunges, pushups and pull-ups.

Four simple full body exercises that work pretty much every muscle group in your entire body plus you are also indirectly working the abs with a lot of those as well.  Try and do a pull-up without having your abs contracted – it’s not going to happen — the same thing with a pushup.

So those are four body weight exercises.  We haven’t even gotten into weight training.  Just doing those four body weight exercises for that 20 minutes instead of all the ab exercises, you’re not only going to burn a lot more calories during the actual workout, but now you’ve worked every single muscle in your body practically.
So now your metabolism is elevated for hours and hours.

Sometimes the studies you see from an intense resistance training workout your metabolism can be elevated for up to two days following the workout.  So now while your body is trying to repair what you’ve done because you’ve worked your muscles so hard it is using extra calories compared to what you barely had any effect on your body just wasting time doing all those crunches and twists and stuff.

There is no only the caloric effect where you’re burning more calories, but also when you do big exercises like that it stimulates the release of more growth hormones, testosterone.  Hormones like that are also going to indirectly help fat burning and muscle building.

Jim:    Speaking of that, sometimes women get a little nervous when they hear that these masculine hormones are released.  Is that going to affect them?  A woman isn’t going to get bulky from that when a woman does those big lifts.  She’ll be all right.

Michael:    Exactly; it’s going to help balance things out in the body whether it’s a man or a woman.  To be honest, over the years the women that I’ve seen train the heaviest are the ones that have the leanest best bodies.  It’s the women that are afraid to use the heavy weights and won’t use anything more than a three or five pound dumbbell or won’t do weight training at all and will just do cardio – those are the ones that typically struggle with their bodies.

When I can convince them to just give in and start doing some heavier training, I’ve pretty much never seen someone bulk up.  I’ve never seen someone look like a body builder.  But the important thing is that you’re finally actually training your body under heavy enough resistance to stimulate its change; to increase your metabolism; to force it to change.  That’s so important for the women as well.
Jim:    That makes sense.  As far as base metabolism goes, if you have more muscle is it true you’ll naturally consume more calories because there’s more muscle there and that burns more calories than fat?  Is that true?

Michael:    Well yeah.  The more muscle your body has, it’s an active tissue in your body so it is consuming calories compared to fat.  If you added 10 pounds extra muscle on your body you’d have an increased metabolic rate.  Your body would need to burn more calories to maintain that muscle.

That effect is going to be a lot lower if you just had 10 pounds extra fat.  Really the only extra calories you’re burning if you have the extra fat are just from carrying around that extra weight.  So yes, it’s a big difference.