"The Final Nail in the Cardio Coffin"

In seven months of training, I calculated that I worked out for 374 hours — that's an average of over thirteen hours a week! If I burned just ten calories a minute, it adds up to 224,400 calories. Doing the math (at 3,500 calories per pound), 224,400 calories should equal sixty four pounds lost!

Needless to say, I did not lose 64 pounds. Over those seven months, training an average thirteen to fourteen hours a week, I lost all of five pounds. That... was... it.

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After completing my Ironman, I made fat loss my primary goal for eight weeks. I eliminated all steady-state endurance exercise. No running, biking, swimming, or anything else in the steady-state.

My workouts consisted of high intensity for short bursts, whether it was with weights or doing a metabolic interval session. I lifted weights three days a week, and I performed interval-training workouts on the other days.

I made sure the interval workouts weren't on a treadmill or a bike. I only used bodyweight-exercise circuits, along with kettlebell circuits, as my cardio workouts.

These metabolic cardio workouts would crank my heart rate up for two minutes, I'd recover, and then repeat. Doing these interval circuits, along with strength training, took up a total of five to six hours a week, nothing like the twenty to thirty hours of Ironman training!

What happened? Like magic, my abs came back!

I dropped fifteen pounds of fat in an eight-week period and my body returned to being strong, defined, and lean. I no longer looked like a flabby endurance athlete, and I did it in a quarter of the time, compared to the aerobic training.