Shortcut to Shred Program Overview

There are very few men and women out there who don’t want to be leaner. All of us wish we could possess impressive muscularity and a ripped set of abs. Yet unfortunately, many find that more difficult to achieve than expected.

While diet and supplements are critical for getting lean (and I’ve laid it all out for you in the Shortcut to Shred nutrition section), training is a very critical component. When it comes to training, the truth of the matter is that both weight training and cardio are necessary for dropping the most body fat in the shortest time possible. Yet in today’s fast-paced world, many people don’t have time to tack a long cardio session onto to the end of their lifting routine. Luckily, there's cardioacceleration!

Accelerated Fat Loss

If you aren’t familiar with cardioacceleration, I’ll bring you up to speed. It’s a form of cardio that’s changing the way everyone thinks about training. It combines weight training and weight lifting into one workout. Simply put, you do a set of weights (for example, the bench press) and then immediately follow it with one minute of cardio. Then, you immediately do another set of weights and hit another minute of cardio. You go in this manner for the whole workout, and in an hour or less you’ve lifted and done your cardio and can call it a day.

In addition to allowing you to get in and out of the gym faster, the benefits of doing cardioacceleration – both in terms of fat loss and muscle building – are even better than doing your weight lifting and cardio separately. There are a number of reasons for this. One study from the University of California-Santa Cruz found that when they had subjects do one minute of cardioacceleration between sets, the subjects experienced better muscle recovery. This is likely due to greater blood flow to the muscles, as you’re keeping your heart rate up throughout the entire workout. Increased blood flow means more nutrients and anabolic hormones are being delivered to the muscles. It can also increase muscle pump, which can lead to greater muscle growth due to the stretch it places on the cells.

Where enhanced fat loss via cardioacceleration is concerned, the most obvious reason is that you burn more calories by going back and forth between cardio and weights than by standing around after every lifting set. Another reason is that, because you’re only doing one minute of cardio at a clip, you can go more intensely than you’d be able to if you did 20-30 minutes of straight cardio. This higher intensity burns more calories during the workout as well as more calories (especially from body fat) long after the workout is over. In fact, this “afterburn” could go on for over 24 hours following the training session.

Many who are new to cardioacceleration are confused over whether it's better than HIIT (high-intensity interval training) or not. But what few realize is that cardioacceleration is HIIT. Instead of the typical HIIT, where you alternate between intervals of high-intensity exercise and rest or low-intensity exercise, with cardioacceleration you do intervals of high-intensity cardio-based exercise with intervals of a different type of high-intensity exercise, weight training.

When I say cardio-based exercise, don't assume I'm only talking about typical activities like running on a treadmill or doing the stair-stepper. Sure, you can do those exercises if you want, but you don't have to. There are countless exercises you can do for that one minute – from something as simple as running in place to a more complex exercise like kettlebell snatches. The key is doing exercises that use either the lower body (such as most cardio machines, running stairs or bench step-ups) or ones where the lower and upper body work together (like jumping rope, jumping jacks, dumbbell power cleans, kettlebell clean and jerks, kettlebell swings, hitting a heavy bag or even shadow boxing). Find an exercise that you can do fairly intensely for one full minute, or at the very least working up to one full minute over time.

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