FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL by Vinnie Tortorich, Dean Lorey Page B

you do that will give you the most bang for your buck in the shortest amount of time? By that I mean which exercises will work the most muscles at once?
    First up—legs.
    The three exercises that work the most leg muscles (including your butt) are: squats, lunges and leg press.
    Before we go any further, I debated whether I should use some of those little illustrations to demonstrate how to do these exercises. You know the ones I’m talking about, the ones like this:

    Do you like those? Me neither. If you’re going to spend all that money to make a book, why hire a fifth-grader to do the illustrations? I hate those things. Know what I hate even more? Photos of the author demonstrating the technique with the gratuitous “Oh, I didn’t know my bare abs were actually showing in this picture, but aren’t they great?” shot. So I was trying to come up with a way that I didn’t hate to show you how to do this stuff, and I finally found one. If you go to www.youtube.com/user/AngriestTrainer it’ll take you to my YouTube channel where you can see videos of people demonstrating these techniques and many others. We’re only going to skim the surface of these exercises here. If you want to learn about them in depth, check out the videos.
    Okay, back to legs. Squats, lunges and leg press are the exercises you want to focus on. You can choose to do one, two or all three per session, depending on the amount of time you have.
    How do you know how much weight to use for a given exercise? It’s simple. If you’ve never lifted weight before, or it’s been a long time, you pick an amount of weight that you can easily handle for up to fifteen repetitions over the course of no more than two sets. To be clear, a repetition (or rep) is the number of times you lift the weights in a row. When you’re done, that’s considered a set. Do this for a couple of weeks before you graduate to the kind of lifting you’ll be doing from then on.
    At this point, you want to pick an amount of weight that you can do for three sets of ten repetitions with some difficulty. Once you can easily do three sets of ten reps, increase the number of reps to eleven each set. Once you can easily do that, increase the number of reps to twelve. And once you can do three sets of twelve reps each, then it’s time to move up in weight. How much more weight? Enough to make three sets of ten reps difficult once again.
    Rinse and repeat.
    Second category—upper body.
    Just like with your legs, there are three exercises that give you the best bang for your buck: bench press, shoulder press and lat pulls. But unlike the three leg exercises, these hit different muscles, which is why you should do all three whenever you’re working upper body.
    Finally, abs.
    Truth be told, your abs get worked a lot when you’re doing aerobic activity like running, cycling and elliptical, but it doesn’t hurt to throw in some sit-ups or a few sets on the gym’s ab machines when time permits.
    This, by the way, brings me to another Vinnie-ism.
    You want great abs, work on your diet .
    Contrary to what the magazines would have you believe, the only way to get washboard abs is to lose the fat around your middle. You can do sit-ups and ab work around the clock and never achieve what you’re after because no matter how much muscle you build on your stomach, you can’t see it through fat. And, just to clear up a common misconception, sit-ups don’t help you burn fat around your middle. In fact, you can’t spot-lose fat in any area solely through exercise. As I tell my clients, if you want to spot-lose fat, get liposuction.
    In case you’re wondering, getting liposuction is a bad idea, just like taking steroids. Want to know another bad idea? Colonics. They’re basically the same concept as liposuction. With liposuction, you’re paying someone to suck your fat out. With colonics, you’re paying someone to suck your crap out.
    Think about that for a second.
    There are people out