Zuzka Light - 15 Minutes to Fit: The Simple 30-Day Guide to Total Fitness, 15 Minutes At A Time

D espite the balmy Mediterranean weather, sweat poured off my bodythats how hard I was training. Heaving with exhaustion, I tackled the final set of burpees. Dont let the cute name fool you: Burpees are a tough, wildly effective way to blast fat and build lean muscle.

The locals on Malta seemed perplexed by the sight of an eastern European woman in a sports bra with a firm stomach hopping up and down as though the rooftopwhere we were filming this workoutwere on fire, but I was doing exactly that. Im sure these witnesses thought I was crazy.

From a standing position, I dropped into a squat and placed my palms on the ground. Without hesitating I kicked my legs back and assumed the top of a push-up position. I performed the push-up, and then, without hesitation, I drew my legs back into the low squat stance, glutes near the ground, before driving my body upward. I dropped into another rep and then another and another. I had no weights, no equipment, no gym, but I was cranking out reps of the most effective exercise that I think you can perform: Burpees work more than 200 muscles during each rep while leaving you gasping for additional oxygen after a set. This may exhaust you, but it helps you grow, and it also helps you feel alive.

My husband at that time, Freddy, recorded the entirety of this workout in Malta. We spent much of our tentative marriage traveling to far-flung locations and filming my daily workouts, posting them on YouTube and our website. The first of these workouts was filmed in Prague, where I was born and raised. Then we moved to Canada, where he was raised. But that days workout took place in Malta, where the low cost of living and balmy California-like weather helped us film outdoors. I could take off my sweats and train in my sports bra and shorts, showcasing my abs without freezing off my glutes. At that time, I was in my early twenties, and I didnt understand how these short workout videos we made would change my life for the better over the following years.

In early 2008, Freddy and I launched our fledgling business BodyRock.tv. We started smallwhen we launched the first website, I was working in a flower shop owned by my in-laws in Kingston, Ontario, Canadabut still, I was sure that people would like it. I knew it would take a while before the website started to make money, at least a year, but I knew it was going to work. BodyRock.tv started slowly, but then our YouTube channel started growing like crazy. With our short, intense, no-gym-required workouts, Freddy and I were on to a new workout style that people embraced in droves. It took only six months for us to reach one million views.

I based my workouts on moves I could perform anywhere because we couldnt afford gym memberships. Almost all of the workouts I found online were either bodybuilding style and directed toward men, or yoga-oriented for women. Neither of these suited my goals of burning body fat and adding lean muscle, so I invented my own training style, taking a few elements from an upstart movement called CrossFit, others from Tabata training, and adding my own unique twist to every influence I liked and thought would be effective.

Sure, some of my YouTube viewers were guys tuning in because they liked to watch a woman work out. But women constituted 90 percent of my audience. Despite our remote locations and low-tech approach to making fitness videos, my workout videos became a global fitness sensation. Millions of BodyRockers were doing my workouts every day and posting their fat-loss stories online. So I kept it up; I posted a video of my workouts each day and poured my heart, soul, and sweat out on-camera, making each workout more intense than every other at-home workout program. My fans loved the outdoor setting of the videos we shot in Malta, where we moved to from Canada. Malta helped us in other, unexpected ways. Uploading a video to the Web took six hours on this remote island. The longer the video, the longer it took us to upload it. To save uploading time, my workouts became shorter and more intense, until I distilled them to 15 minutes of fat-burning moves done in nonstop fashion. Rest came only after the workout ended.

I think part of my appeal was that I didnt bark orders or emphasize counts as some fitness personalities do. I didnt tell people what to do. I merely performed my workouts from start to finish, grunting and sweating along with viewers who were in it with me every rep of the way. There was a realness to these YouTube workouts that many at-home fitness programs dont provide.