Jan 12
5
Workouts to Get Ripped
Everyone and their pet dog wants to get ripped nowadays, and most people gravitate towards the idea of doing exercise to get that way. Diet isn’t exactly ignored, but more than diets, people think they need workouts to get ripped. Why? I’m not sure why, but I think it has something to do with being active. It feels like you should be making a lot more progress if you are doing something; especially if it’s something that is uncomfortable. People also think that food that tastes like cardboard is good for you. Anyway, I think you should look at what works and what doesn’t work to make your decision. leave stuff that’s uncomfortable and tastes like cardboard to other people.
So, what works well to get ripped? That’s the million dollar question. I’d say that you might not like the answer. The answer is that exercise is not the best way to get ripped. That’s right. I am writing this post about workouts to get ripped and now I’m telling you that workouts are not the best way to get ripped. what a douche I must be, huh? Well settle down and don’t get your panties in a bunch.
The thing is, that exercise does work to lose fat. In fact, the fastest fat loss ever was probably done by a guy named Andrew Thompson who hiked the Appalachian trail in 47 days. This was quite a feat. It required hard hiking all day long. Andrew lost something like 35 pounds doing it. That’s about three quarters of a pound a day! How much of that was fat, I can’t say. My guess is that a lot of it was lean tissue. But Andrew wasn’t doing it to lose weight or to lose fat so he didn’t measure his body-fat percentages.
Does hiking all day for 47 days straight sound like something you can do? Probably not. No, you’d rather sit on your ass. Wait, that can’t be right. You’re here looking for workouts to get you ripped so you must be down for some exercise! Alright, let’s get started.
Diet is far more important for getting ripped than exercise, but let’s leave that alone and concentrate on what exercises work the best for getting ripped. What we want is a collection of exercises that get our bodies to burn fat the fastest because having low body-fat is what being ripped is. Anyone who mentions ‘muscle tone’ is full of shit and you should run from them as fast as you can. Muscle tone is how much your muscles stay contracted. Its genetic; it can’t be changed by training.
Now let’s get one thing out of the way. There are lots of theories and hypotheses and models about how the body works and often, people come up with great conclusions based on those theories about what you should do to gain muscle and lose fat. The human body is complex and the human mind is fallible, so the best way to test out these conclusions is to simply test them out! Get a bunch of people to do the different workouts and see which group loses the most body fat. This is the benefit of the scientific method. We suck at figuring things out with pure logic. We need to test things out because of that.
When we test different workout methods, we see that there are some clear winners and some clear losers. Long sessions of aerobic exercise is a loser. Does it matter why? No. What matters are the results, and aerobics just plain doesn’t work well unless you do a huge amount of it. Resistance exercise is better, and its effect depends on the intensity and pacing. What works best of all is high intensity interval training. This can be done with sprints, or weight, or anything else that you can do at high intensity for a short amount of time. We can sit around all day and try to come up with theories about why this is, but the fact is: it just plain works. So if you want workouts to get ripped, they’d better include high intensity and interval training.
