Chris Lopez Welcome to this special Fat-Loss Summit interview. Today, we re talking with my good friend Chris Lopez. Chris is my go-to guy when it comes to kettle bell training. He s also amazingly insightful when it comes to the fundamentals of what it takes to burn fat. We re going to talk in this interview about how you can train to improve your performance and, as a by-product, burn more fat. We re going to use some really cool examples from athletes, some of the stuff he does with his clients, and we re going to use the whiteboard behind me to show you some really cool things from some new research and draw out some interesting program designs that will make a lot of sense for you so that you can burn more fat with your workouts in much less time so you don t have to spend all day in the gym, not even an hour. Sit tight, grab a green juice, and enjoy. Yuri: Chris Lopez, welcome to the Fat-Loss Summit. Chris: Thank you for having me, sir. Yuri: Great to have you here. As you can see, we ve got a whiteboard behind us today. We ll tell you why that is. We re going to be drawing some stuff out, playing Hangman and good stuff. We re talking about fat loss today. You have a lot of expertise in this area as it pertains to kettle bells and all sorts of other cool things. We ll talk about that. Before we do, the discussion we ll be centering around today will be on program design and some really cool things you ve come across in the literature that I think is going to really open up your eyes, if you re watching this, to how to put together very effective programs for burning fat without training six hours a day. I don t think we have six hours a day to train. Chris: Nobody does. Yuri: Nor should you. Before we get into that, share with us how you got into helping people get into amazing shape. Chris: For sure. A lot of us in this industry, we all kind of started out playing sports and stuff like that. That s where my obsession with health and fitness stems from. I was obsessed with being able to jump high with vertical jump when I was young. I grew up as a basketball/volleyball player type of athlete. All I wanted to do was be able to jump high because dunking the basketball like that was the epitome for me. Yuri: The coolest kid on the playground at that point, right? 1
Chris: Exactly, yeah. That s kind of how it started, and then I started to get into strength training and understanding how strength training would help support my sports and what I was doing. Then that carried on into university. I went to the University of Guelph; I played a couple years of volleyball for them. My obsession really began when I started to dive into the science of things and how the human body works and everything. I graduated from Guelph with a science degree with a specialization in human kinetics. Then from there, while I was going through that whole trip, I thought I d maybe want to become a physiotherapist or chiropractor because the fitness industry wasn t really an industry as much as it is right now back then. You couldn t be a personal trainer. Back then, a personal trainer was a guy who bounced at clubs as his main job and then would train people because he was massive. I went into the fitness industry as a personal trainer right out of school and then kind of got into kettle bell training. As you know, I have five kids, so my family started to grow a little bit, and I started to run out of time and needed to find a good, efficient way for me to maintain athleticism, still maintain strength levels, and stay relatively lean but try to do it so I m not spending two hours in the gym every day. Yuri: Absolutely. And having five kids I talk about this a lot having constrains is probably one of the best things you can do for achieving a lot of goals. When you have five kids, you don t have a lot of time; you re forced to think outside the box and figure out new strategies to achieve whatever goals you re after. You basically work out at home, for the most part, in your backyard, with a kettle bell. It doesn t get much easier than that. But that s not to say that it s, looking at, Okay, what am I supposed to do with just one kettle bell? How do I get all that benefit out of it? We ll talk about kettle bell training in a second, but let s go back to performance for a second. The viewers, I want you guys to really understand that I m bringing in men and women who not only are amazingly well-versed in these topic matters, but also who live this stuff. You re still very active, your kids are active, you re a model for them, which is amazing. You might be watching, like, I don t want to jump higher. Why should I learn this stuff? We re not talking about vertical jump here. What s interesting is that there are not many overweight people who have a very high vertical jump. It s not to say it s a cause-and-effect between vertical jump height and leanness, but where is the correlation between training in a way that improves your performance and, at the same time, helps you stay lean? How does it all fit together? Chris: I think it all comes down to strength. I m not talking strength like power-lifter strength, being able to dead lift 800 pounds or whatever, but I m talking pound-for-pound strength, relative strength, your ability to be strong given the amount of body weight you re carrying. 2
I think that s the missing factor with a lot of people when they re training now; they kind of disregard strength and they still get into the mentality most people have already come to realize that cardio is the enemy and that it really isn t the most efficient way to burn fat. Yuri: I m certainly hoping so. Chris: Then you get into stuff like endurance training or resistance endurance training, which, essentially, is lifting weights for cardio. People kind of disregard the effectiveness or the value of being strong. When I say strong, I mean strong as in neurologically strong, not strong as in a function of how big your muscles are. Those are two completely different things. Yuri: What does neurologically strong mean, so people understand that? Chris: It s like that wiry strength. If you take a look at somebody like Bruce Lee, for example, he wasn t a very big guy. He was about 5 10, maybe 155 pounds, but his ability to be able to move his body in space and do the things that he was able to do physically was incredible. And he was ripped. I can guarantee you that he never trained to be ripped like that; he pretty much trained his skill and to be that pound-for-pound strength. He s like the epitome of what athleticism really is and something I think everybody should strive to be. I think the biggest problem with what s happened today is that we ve replaced working out as our activity, whereas if you take a look in the athletic realm, athletes train to be good at their sport. We need to incorporate more activity into our lives so that we can train ourselves to be prepared for our lives instead of using that working out as activity. Do you know what I m saying? Yuri: We use working out as repenting our sins from sitting all day. But the research shows that even working out on a day-to-day basis doesn t really make up for all the sitting we do. It makes total sense. Chris: Right. If you sit 8 or 10 hours a day or however long you work for, that s not going to be combated by going to the gym for 45 minutes, three times a week. Yuri: No matter how much you kill yourself. Chris: Exactly. Yuri: Save yourself the insanity. I love the analogy of training for life, kind of looking at improving your performance, and, as a by-product, you ll get the body you want, which is very powerful. Chris: But that s how athletes train, when you think about it. Most athletes, except if you re training for weight or whatever, if you take a look at football players or basketball players, any power athlete, they ve got incredible physiques, but they don t train for that specifically; they just train to be better and more athletic to support that. 3
Yuri: You shared with me a little while ago this really amazing study that we re going to share with you right here. Walk us through this study and how it applies to the viewer watching this in terms of their ability to burn fat. Chris: This is pretty cool. The study was done by a Japanese professor not Tabata his name was Izumiya. What he did was take two groups of Olympic weight lifters. Olympic weight lifters perform the snatch, clean and jerk, really full-body, explosive movements. He took two groups and put one group on what s called the traditional Western strength-training program, where you re doing one to two repetitions, three at the most, and you re resting three to five minutes, using maximal load; anywhere from 90 to 95 some of them were even going the full 100 percent. He took a second group and gave them 70 to 80 percent load sub-maximal but still relatively heavy. He asked them to do the same amount of repetitions anywhere from the one to three range, except he cut their rest time down between 60 and 90 seconds. After a six-week period when he did that study, he found that the group that rested 60 to 90 seconds as opposed to the three-to-five-minute rest group, they were able to put on muscle, decrease body fat their weight relatively stayed the same and they were able to increase their strength by 10 percent more than the traditional group was able to do. That s great that they were able to get strong, because we were talking about the value of strength, but the most amazing thing was the metabolic effect of it. The fact that they dropped fat, they did that independent of diet. They weren t even tracking what they were eating; they weren t on a fat-loss diet. They weren t watching their carbs, protein, nothing like that; it was completely dietindependent, and they were able to lose fat. Basically, that s the holy grail of fitness: being able to put on muscle, lose fat at the same time, and get stronger. Yuri: That s huge. Just to clarify, we have group one, which was one to three reps. Let s call it max load. Chris: Three to five minutes rest between sets. Yuri: This is a typical power lifter, lots of recovery, heavy lifting type of protocol. Group two, we ve got one to three reps, and they re lifting 70 to 80 percent not their maximum weight they can possibly lift, but they re taking 60 to 90 seconds rest. Chris: Right. Yuri: The two parameters we re working with here are the weight and rest. Based on what you learned from the study, can you talk about why, if we look at the recovery/rest intervals, why, in this case, it was more effective for burning fat? 4
Chris: Basically, it s density. The amount of work they re doing within a given period of time was higher. The volume actually ended up being higher. What that did was cause a metabolic effect where you re increasing EPOC, or excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. The after-effect of it was that they had an elevated metabolism for a longer period of time. The other thing that really should be mentioned here is that these people, in both groups, they re never training to failure. When you re training Olympic weight lifters, that is their sport, so they are training for perfect technique and really just trying to get better at that technique. Regardless of the rest time that was involved, they were still training with more technique. It s just that these guys here, they didn t need as much rest because they re only training at 70 to 80 percent of the load, as opposed to max load that these guys were training. This here is really taxing on your nervous system because of the amount of weight you re lifting; you re pretty much lifting at max the whole time, whereas these guys are sub-max. They have a little bit more time to really focus on the skill of strength and being able to just focus on that. That allowed them to cut the rest time down so they can get more work in within whatever given period of time, be it an hour or 45 minutes or however long they were training for. Yuri: Do they say in the study how long this workout took versus how long this workout took? Chris: This workout took about 120 minutes, so, two hours. Yuri: I don t know if you want to spend two hours doing that, but I don t. Chris: And these guys were done in about 60 minutes. Yuri: Even that s considered a long workout by our standards, but, still, I m sure you can take those principles and condense them just by designing your programs more effectively. Chris: And this is part of the reason why I like the kettle bell so much. These were Olympic weight lifters, so these are big, full-body movements. The clean requires every single muscle in the body to be working there. With kettle bell training, you ve got the clean, the press. There are a lot of full-body movements involved with kettle bell training, which is why when I experimented with this and did it with some of my fat-loss clients, we saw similar results in the sense that they weren t really worried about their diet, but we still saw really impressive fat-loss results as they were doing it. Yuri: That s awesome. Let s talk about kettle bells. I tell my audience if you re deserted on an island and you only had one thing to have with you workout-wise, it would definitely be a kettle bell. I m a huge fan of it, and when it comes to kettle bells, Chris is the man. He is my go-to resource for kettle bells. Not that he s a dealer of kettle bells, but he is the man in terms of training. Talk to us about why kettle bells are so effective and a number of different ways somebody can use a kettle bell for the purposes of getting stronger and burning fat. 5
Chris: Well, kettle bells are a good bang-for-your-buck tool, but it s a matter of whether or not you re using them right. There are exercises you can do with a kettle bell, and then there are kettle bell exercises. If I were to pick up a kettle bell and do a biceps curl, that s an exercise I can do with a kettle bell. But if you re doing a clean and press kind of what the Olympic-lifting group was doing that s a kettle bell exercise, only because of the way that the kettle bell is shaped and the way you use it. It s a lot easier on your joints than a barbell would be. It allows you to really focus on the skill of what it is you re doing. When we re doing kettle bell stuff, we focus a lot on density training because we only have a single weight; we can t add weight to the bar. There s a principle in training called progressive overload. That s a matter of how much work you re doing and how you re overloading your body. We can t overload our bodies traditionally with a kettle bell by adding more weight to it. What we can do, though, is do more work in less time, and we do that by either moving the kettle bell faster provided that we ve got good skill at it or we cut the rest time down. What that does is allow you to work neurologically, getting better at the skill of what it is you re doing and then, in turn, getting stronger. As you re getting stronger and cutting that rest time down, we start falling into this group here, where we start seeing really good metabolic effects where you re burning fat. Yuri: Nice. We ve had a couple interviews in this summit so far. We ve talked about the benefit of using heavier weights, lower-repetition range for developing strength and burning fat without necessarily bulking up. With kettle bells, you can do kettle bell swings for 20, 30 reps, depending on the weight. How does somebody watching this say, How do I take the general recommendation of going a little bit heavier, maybe lower-repetition range? Do I even need to do that with kettle bells? What would a basic fat-loss program or work out be with a kettle bell? Chris: Good question. The first thing you want to do is start with the strength aspect of what it is you re doing. I really like cleans and presses and squats for strength. When I talk about strength, I mean we re going to go anywhere from the one- to three-rep range, and we re going to focus on the skill of it. As I was saying before, because we ve only got that one weight, the way I like to program things is through density. For example, if I have you doing a clean and press I ll use C and P as a clean and press. We ve got a clean and press, and we like to use ladders when we re kettle bell training. I ll say, Let s do a Russian ladder of one, two, and three reps. Yuri: A clean and press, for everyone watching, is essentially a dumbed-down version of it is taking the weight from the floor, to the shoulder, and then above the head. Chris: And then pressing it up. 6
Yuri: It s a huge distance you re moving the weight. Chris: Right. With a kettle bell clean, you ve got an explosive movement to take it from the floor to bring it here; that takes a lot of work, and it s very explosive. Then there s a grinding movement involved, where you re pressing the kettle bell overhead. Because it s such a high skill and, if you re going heavy enough, it s a high-load activity, you really don t go more than three reps. What we re doing with this ladder is: You re going to do one rep on the right side, one rep on the left side; then you re going to do two on the right, two on the left; three on the right, three on the left. The ladder requires you to have really big-picture outlooks. The way I would structure this is say to do as many ladders as you can within 10 minutes. Yuri: Just to clarify, this is in a fluid sequence. You re doing one, one, two, two, three, three. Chris: The biggest thing here especially with a clean and press, because it s a strength exercise you don t want to turn it into cardio. This requires you to have a really big-picture outlook. Your first workout you re doing is setting a baseline for yourself. You re going to get a number, whatever number that is, and you ll know that you re improving because that number is going to increase each subsequent workout. Don t worry too much about whether you re huffing and puffing or whether you re out of breath or feeling the burn because that s not what this is about. This is about strength and getting better at the skill of strength and then cutting that rest period down as time goes by. You can see how you really need to have a big-picture outlook. This is a workout, but it s a workout within a program. That s the biggest difference and that s one of the flaws I see in the fitness industry. Everybody takes a bunch of random works and throw them together and call that a program, but that s not a program. A program is specific workouts done so that there s progression and knowing exactly when to back off. You can t go 150 percent every single time you go to the gym. Yuri: You ll burn out, for sure. Chris: Exactly. Back to this: Ten minutes is your guideline; you re going to do as many ladders as you can within 10 minutes. That means rest as often as you want, but the whole point of this, there are three things. Number one: Lift as explosively as possible. Yuri: Why would somebody want to lift explosively? Chris: You want to lift explosively because you want to be able to recruit your big bang-for-yourbuck muscle fibers; your Type IIB and Type IIX muscle fibers. Those are the fast-twitch muscle fibers, and the reason why we want to do that is because those are the ones that require the most amount of energy from your body. 7
Yuri: i.e. calories, if you want to think about it that way. Chris: That s exactly it. That s why you want to lift explosively. Yuri: Not like this. Chris: Right. It s not going to be about feeling the burn; it s lifting explosively, moving quickly. The second thing you want to do is be fresh. Unlike common workout modalities or programs that you see these days, where they want you to go 150, 200 percent every single time, that is not what this is about. Remember, this is programming; this isn t working out. We want to make sure we re as fresh as possible. What that means is, if you re doing ladders of one, two, and three in your first workout and you have to rest for 30 seconds between one and two and then you have to rest for 60 seconds between two and three, then so be it. That s only your first workout. You re going to strive to improve as each subsequent workout occurs. The third parameter is: You want to be able to lift as often as possible, provided that you re still able to lift explosively and you re able to do it in a fresh state. Yuri: Naturally, you wouldn t be able to lift explosively if you re not fresh, hence why you want to be fresh. Chris: Exactly. And this is why density comes into play. Say, for example, you re able to do, in your first workout you can do, you go through three ladders within 10 minutes. That s a total of 18 reps. Six repetitions within one ladder, times three is 18. In your second workout, your goal would be to try and get to doing more than 18 reps. Then the third workout after that, you want to try to get to do more than that, and the workout after that, you want to do more than that, all within this 10-minute parameter. As you can see, what we re doing is maintaining explosivity in our workouts, we are making sure that we re fresh, but if we re trying more and more each and every time, we re actually getting better. We re getting stronger and that increases this number here, which means that our rest time is decreasing. We re actually getting in better shape. Yuri: Very similar to sprinting, if we were to use that as an analogy with interval training and shortening the recovery period. Chris: Yeah. Basically, all this is is that you want to be able to do more work in the same amount of time over a long period of time. It requires you to have programming and a big-picture outlook as opposed to I need to get this workout done. I need to kick my butt. You can t do that every single time. Yuri: Totally. We talked about this often. How often should somebody whether it s this type of workout or any other type of workout how often should they be training throughout the week? 8
Chris: It depends on the individual and the amount of time they have to be able to dedicate to training. Believe it or not, if I m with a fat-loss client, I will get them to do something every day, even if it s just 10 minutes, because I want to be able to build the habit, create the habit. Once that habit is formed, then we can start to dial things down a little bit, dial things in. I can maybe get them doing three times of a week of a little bit longer duration and still doing that 10 minutes every single day. I like to get people to move every day because I think they should be moving every day. Yuri: It makes sense. Chris: It s not going to be a hard core workout. I m not going to Crossfit you I had to throw it out there; I m sorry. I m not going to get you to go 120 percent and puke your guts out six days a week because that just doesn t make any sense. Our bodies don t adapt that way; they don t work that way. To answer your question, I would get somebody to move six days a week, 10 minutes a day, every day, so that they build a habit. Yuri: And these types of workouts just a few times throughout the week? Chris: Two to three times a week. Yuri: Recovery, rest. Rest as in not killing yourself every day is an important component. Chris: Yes, absolutely. Yuri: I ve got a couple questions specific to fat loss. The first one is: In your experience, what is one thing that people don t know they don t even know about losing fat? Something they re totally unaware of. Chris: I had time to think about this too. Fat loss is a by-product of strength. Yuri: That s a quotable. That s a good one. Fat loss is a by-product of strength. Explain that. Chris: If you take a look at the best athletes in the world, who train for strength and power, they have incredible physiques without specifically training for fat loss. Sprinters, take a look at position players, football players, take a look at your football, soccer players, rugby, basketball players. These guys have incredible, incredible physiques, but they re not training specifically for fat loss. They re training for power, because basketball players, soccer players, sprinters, they ve got to be able to jump high, they ve got to be able to run fast, they ve got to be able to really use those fasttwitch muscles. That s what they specifically train for; they don t train to be lean and have six-pack abs, yet they do. It just happens. Fat loss is a by-product of strength and power. 9
Yuri: And it s a very different type, if we compare that to the marathon runner or aerobics instructor I m not knocking aerobics instructors because I think it s great just to get people active but if we look at the bodies, there s a very different, distinction. We have marathon runners, those who are doing very high-repetition, low-weight endurance type activity, where it s almost like a skinny fat, versus the ones we re talking about here, which are more developed, lean, muscular, but not in a massive body builder type of fashion. Chris: Because they re strong. From a relative standpoint and this is another thing I like to tell clients strength is your container; it s the container from which you can put other physical qualities into. If you want to put muscle on, the best thing to do is get stronger, because then the amount of weights you ll be able to lift are going to be that much heavier, and then you can go into your highervolume hypertrophy workouts. If you want to lose fat, it s good to be strong first because then, again, the more work you can do, the heavier resistance you re using. Even from an endurance standpoint, if you want to be able to go longer or if you want to be faster at your endurance event, that s all dependent on the amount of force you re able to exert into the ground, to be able to push off. Strength is literally your container. There s a whole hierarchy of how people should train or what people need to focus on in order for them to achieve that peak physique that everybody s looking for and be able to perform like a human should. Yuri: That s great. It s the human Tupperware, strength. Chris: Exactly. Your job is to increase the size of your container, because the stronger you are, the more things you can put into that container. Yuri: Totally. I wrote this down. We would know this from physics. If you ve taken physics at some point in your life, you may know this equation. Work equals force times displacement. The bigger your container, the more work you can do. Work is essentially just a measure of how many calories you burn. Force would be how much weight you can lift, how much force you can generate. Distance or displacement is how much distance you move that weight over. For instance, like the clean and press that we talked about. You re moving that weight over a huge distance compared to doing a biceps curl, which is one foot. If you just look at how you move more weights over a greater distance, you re going to burn more calories. And if you re stronger, you re able to do more of that. That s great. Chris: Strength, it s the key. Yuri: Very cool. I hope you guys took notes here. Rewind, watch it again. Another question: What is a big mistake you see people make when they re pursuing the goal of losing fat? 10
Chris: Jumping to endurance first. When you re lifting sub-maximal load for countless repetitions, basically, what you re doing is cardio. We already know that, because of the compensator effect, that s not the most efficient way to burn fat. In fact, your body will want to hold on to that fat a lot more than it would if you were lifting some appreciable weight. I m biased because I come from a strength bias; I think everybody needs to get stronger. Yuri: I m biased as a former soccer player whose main job is to run and chase balls. I totally agree. Chris: I think people starting off with a fat-loss program, I think the biggest mistake they can make is thinking they just need to lift light weights for 15 reps. It s great for skill acquirement, because strength is a skill, but in the grand scheme of things, when you start to attain that skill and you ve cleaned up any movement patterns and are able to really move well, that s when I think you really need to be able to go into that 70 to 80 percent range. You re not going maximum weight, but you re going to 70 to 80 percent of what you can lift maximally and work with that, practice with that, and cut your rest time down. Yuri: Nice. And this applies to men, women, if you re 20 years old, 70 years old, anywhere in between. Chris: Yeah. Not only that, but it applies to any modality. I m talking from a kettle bell perspective, but you can use these principles, they re transcendent. You can use them for barbell training, dumbbell training, body-weight training, as well. The demographic but also the type of exercise, what you re using for the exercise also applies, not just the kettle bells. I just happen to be the kettle bell guy. Yuri: You re more than just kettle bells, don t worry. Chris: Thanks, man. Yuri: Final question here: There s been a bit of a crisis in the world, and we have this fatness epidemic. The human species is about to become extinct because of the fact that we re so overweight. You ve been called into a special task force, and they re asking you, Chris, what is the one thing we can do as a population to solve this problem starting today? What do you say? Chris: Wow. I m going to go completely off the cuff, and you ll probably be able to appreciate this. You need to sleep better. Yuri: That s pretty good. Chris: I think because sleeping eight hours kills off all the bad bacteria in your gut. It ll give you better immune function, and you ll get sick less. Sleep because it s able to regulate your hormones, especially if you re working out and need that recovery time. Sleep is crucial; that s your body s time to recover. We work out and that s the stimulus we put in the body, but nothing really happens when we re working out. Everything happens when we re recovering. 11
Yuri: That s a great way of looking at it. I don t know if a lot of people really think about that. We re not growing during the workout; it s when we re sleeping. Chris: Exactly. We re creating that stimulus; we re creating the environment for our body to adapt, but the only way our body adapts is if we re able to have enough recovery time. With the way the Western society is, where people are so stressed out and they re on their electronic devices all the time, they re only sleeping four to six hours a night, I don t think people are optimizing their hormones. I think gut heath is going to be a big concern in 2015 as well. I think that s going to really come into the forefront, with you leading the way. I think sleep is that missing factor. Yuri: That s good. Great advice. Both Chris and I are big early-morning people. You get up at 4:30? Chris: 4:45. Yuri: I get up at 5 every day. We have kids, so we have to get up early to get started. And it s not that we re going to bed at midnight; we re going to bed at 9, 8:30, whatever it is. It s definitely a choice, but whether it s going to bed at 9 or 10 or whatever it is, it s very, very important. Chris: I actually have an alarm to tell me when to go to bed. Yuri: Nice! Chris: I ve got an alarm to wake me up, although 4:45 is almost natural now, like clockwork, but I have an alarm to tell me when to go to bed. That s when I know to shut everything down and start getting prepped for bed. Yuri: Beautiful. Chris Lopez, thank you so much for joining us, buddy. Chris: Thank you for doing this! This is great, man. Yuri: Absolutely. I hope you guys enjoyed it. 12