Brett Klika - 7 Minutes to Fit: 50 Anytime, Anywhere Interval Workouts

DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to all of those who have helped me on my mission to bring health to the masses. Text copyright 2015 by Brett Klika. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Klika, Brett.
Seven minutes to fit : 50 anytime, anywhere interval workouts / Brett Klika. Exercise. 2. 2.

Physical fitness. I. Title.
GV481.K536 2015
613.71dc23 Design and illustrations by Walter C Baumann The information, techniques, and exercises in this book are solely those of Brett Klika, a certified strength and conditioning specialist and personal trainer, who is not acting in the capacity of a doctor. The information presented in this book should not be construed as medical advice and is not meant to replace treatment by licensed health professionals. Please consult your doctor or professional health-care advisor to determine your bodys needs and limitations. The writer and publisher hereby disclaim any liability from injuries resulting from following any recommendation in this book.

Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, California 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com

IN MY WORK AS A PERSONAL TRAINER, author, and motivational speaker, I have helped tens of thousands of people from all over the world improve their health by making exercise a part of their lives. Ive shown them how to enjoy exercise in boardrooms and living rooms, football fields and cornfields, sunny beaches and snowy mountaintops, trains, airplanes, and everything in between. By demonstrating how anyone can make strategic use of simple execises, Ive helped everyone from Olympic athletes to overweight children transform their lives through movement. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), regular exercise is one of the most significant things you can do for your health. Frequent exercisers experience a decreased likelihood of heart disease, certain types of cancer, type 2 diabetes, depression, sleep irregularity, osteoporosis, neurological dysfunction, and a host of other health problems. While its widely accepted that physical activity from daily exercise can improve health, I still encounter resistance from the time-strapped, energy-deprived masses who struggle to find the minutes or motivation to get to the gym.

The good news for all is that exercise need not be confined to the gyms, tracks, and studios of the world. A beneficial workout requires no special equipment, costs nothing, and is accessible to anyone with a floor and a chair. Even better news from researchers in the field of health and human performance is that we dont need to exercise for long periods of time to achieve the health, fitness, and body we strive for. In as little as a few seconds, exercise has been shown to improve mood and mental focus. In just a few minutes, we can improve markers of fitness (heart health, insulin sensitivity, and metabolic function) and drastically increase circulating levels of feel-good neurotransmitters. In less than thirty minutes of high-intensity exercise, we can positively impact our metabolism for up to seventy-two hours, decrease our likelihood of early death, increase the number of fat-burning enzymes in our muscle, improve our glucose metabolism, and decrease body fat.

All this in just a few minutes out of your day! That time before the kids wake up or after they go to bed, the thirty minutes you have at lunch, the twenty-minute study breakall of these situations could become opportunities to improve your health and energy. 7 Minutes to Fit will help you break down the barriers that prevent most people from exercising: the need for more minutes, money, or motivation to go to the gym. These pages will show you that with the right kind of approach and the best piece of exercise equipment ever created your bodyyou can get stronger, become more fit, and burn body fat in the few minutes your busy life affords you. Youre holding the blueprint in your hands!

Strategic, high-intensity workouts are often cited in the research on efficient exercise. This type of regimen, known as high-intensity interval training, is currently being used by millions of people around the world to get results from exercise in a short amount of time. Standard interval trainingoriginally used to improve the performance of track athletesraises your heart rate for a period of time, followed by a period of time when your heart rate decreases, or recovers.

This is repeated a number of times. For example, you could perform an exercise for one minute, then rest for one minute, and then repeat that process ten times. In high-intensity interval training, you significantly elevate your heart rate, usually to about 90 percent of your maximum, for a short period of time. Recovery time is usually either at full rest or at an intensity at or below about 70 percent of your maximum heart rate. Interval training and high-intensity interval training programs are alternatives to long-duration, low-intensity aerobic training, which has long been embraced by the fitness crowd. Various studies comparing low-intensity, long-duration work to high-intensity interval training have demonstrated that the latter may be more efficient in burning fat and improving fitness.

Scientists in Australia recently found that high-intensity interval training for sixty minutes per week resulted in the same amount of fat loss as seven hours of low-intensity work. In other words, better results in far less time! I saw the universal appeal for this more efficient approach to exercise when I coauthored a review on the benefits of short-duration, high-intensity interval training for the American College of Sports Medicine. The New York Times published the review and coined it The Scientific 7-Minute Workout. The article quickly went viral, and now a search for 7-minute workout yields nearly 100 million results on Google. How to Use This Book7 Minutes to Fit presents fifty effective and targeted interval workouts that range from focusing on a single area of the body to providing an invigorating calorie-burning full-body challenge. I have drawn from more than fifteen years of personal experience creating customized workouts to present exercises that work for people at all skill levels and focus on different parts of the body.

To get started, I have created a glossary of forty-one exercises you can do with just your body weight and a chair. Each exercise is carefully described and includes an illustration to show exactly how you should perform the movement. While you might recognize some of these movements from your days in phys ed, sports practice, or exercise class, you may not know that these are among the most powerful exercises for raising your heart rate and changing your body. When used in the right combinations with strategic intensity, these exercises can yield impressive results. As you begin, make sure to read and follow the glossary descriptions and perform each movement with the correct technique, so that your exercise is safe and effective. Once youve mastered the basic movements, its time to dive into the fifty high-intensity interval workouts.

These bodyweight workouts are organized so you can choose to work your entire body or target a specific area, such as your arms, legs, or abs. Even for these more targeted workouts, nearly every muscle is involved to some degree, in order to create a balanced body. This not only provides a unique challenge, but also prevents injuries and improves posture. Fifty different exercise routines enable you to choose a different workout every day for nearly two months. That means every day youll have a new strategy to maximize your health in minimal time. So much for exercise being repetitive and boring! Plus, at the end of the book, I have listed ways to vary the workouts to allow for even more exercise options.

Next page