TWO WEEKS BURN LOADS OF BODY FAT WITH THIS HIGHINTENSITY TRAINING PROGRAM AND NUTRITION PLAN

Who says a get-lean phase has to take place at the beginning of the year or heading into summer? Any time is a good time for your abs to be shredded and the rest of your muscles sliced and diced just the same. Which is why the timing is perfect right now for this 12-week fat-burning, weightlifting, and cardio programs and meal plan. The training is high-volume and intense, and the diet manipulates macronutrients in such a way that your metabolism will hit the roof. Three months from now you’ll be as lean as ever, if not sooner.


CARDIO CONSIDERATIONS
As with your weight workouts, your ap-proach to cardio will vary each week. You’ll alternate between steady-state cardio and high-intensity interval sessions to burn fat through different mechanisms. Each week you’ll stride through as many as five cardio workouts, each lasting 20–60 minutes. You can get more out of these sessions by performing them before breakfast or post-workout; saving cardio for after highrep sessions with a given body part can help burn more subcutaneous body fat from that area. The fat, which is mobilized through exercise, is then used as fuel during cardio rather than redepositing itself under your skin. With that in mind, try to get your cardio in after your ab workout(s) each week and schedule a few other sessions for first thing in the morning.

SHREDDING SEASON
For the next 12 weeks we give you a full playbook: heavy sets of six reps, moderately weighted sets of 10–12 reps, and lighter sets of 20. For abs, you’ll dabble in 30-rep sets at times, giving your belly the opportunity to burn some of the released fat after a hardcore cardio session. As for cardio, let’s just say you’re going to work hard and sweat through plenty of towels. But as you adapt and improve week after week, your body will switch to calorieburning autopilot, where each workout will force your body to call upon its stubborn fat stores for energy. By the end of the program, you can expect to be at your absolute leanest.


INTENSELY LEAN While the exercises laid out in this program aren’t too complicated, the offbeat split and gamut of rep ranges will likely take some getting used to. But don’t worry, the routine described above and presented on the following pages is structured to help you recruit boatloads of fibers within your targeted muscle groups—and thus burn more fat and grow more muscle—over the next 12 weeks. The addition of cardio will serve only to speed things up.