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The Only 5 Workouts I Used To Go From 17% To 12% Body Fat At 45 Years Old (Whilst Drinking 1 Bottle Of Wine Per Night)
I recently embarked on a total body overhaul; a mission to reduce body fat to levels I haven’t recorded for 5 years or more, whilst building muscle, and not completely giving up on my daily vice (or one of them): the old fermented grape juice.
Miraculously, I was somewhat successful, managing to ditch the Dadbod and add 5kg of muscle to my generally lean frame, whilst stripping away 5% body fat – getting down to 12.7% from 17.5%.
I managed this by performing the same 5 workouts on rotation – none of them complicated, overly time-consuming, nor requiring a huge amount of equipment. I just used the beach, a cheap gym membership and my collection of second-hand dumbbells.
And here are those exact 5 workouts, broken down in detail for you, dear reader.
1. Dumbbell Strength Conditioning
Type: Dumbell Intervals
Location: Beach or Backyard
Total Workout Time (including warm-up) = 35 Minutes
This workout became an almost-daily staple during lockdown as friends came over for an outdoor (or occasionally indoor) workout with the dumbbells.
Because it combines strength work (the dumbbells) with a conditioning element (the short rest periods), it almost becomes a cardio-style workout but with better results (in my opinion).
If you’re short on time, you do NOT need to go to a gym and push some weights around AND then go for a run or hop on the exercise bike.
Instead – DO THIS WORKOUT ⬇️
A 6 minute warmup (including a 4 minute Tabata of jumping jacks & mountain climbers) and 24 minutes of this (that’s 3 rounds) gives you a 30 minutes workout that will give you some seriously good results in terms of both strength endurance improvements and turn you into a fat-burning machine as the EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) kicks in a bit and your CNS (central nervous system) recovers from being taxed at the highest marginal rate.
Best of all: you can do it at home, in the yard, at the gym, in the garage.
The workout looks exactly like this:
40 secs dumbbell deadlifts
20 secs rest
40 sec dumbbell shoulder press
20 secs rest
40 secs dumbbell cleans
20 secs rest
40 secs dumbbell squats
20 secs rest
40 secs dumbbell bicep curls
20 secs rest
40 secs dumbbell tricep extension (single dumbbell)
20 secs rest
40 secs single-arm dumbbell snatch
20 secs rest
40 secs single-arm dumbbell snatch
20 secs rest
Rest 2 minutes
Repeat x 2 times (3 rounds in total)
2. Bodyweight HIIT
Type: HIIT Conditioning
Location: Beach
Total Workout Time (inc warm-up) = 45 Minutes
This is a bodyweight HiiT workout, usually involving some running to and from various cones in between the bodyweight exercises.
The beauty is that you can vary it any and which way you like, so an example might be:
21 bodyweight squats
14 sit-ups
7 push-ups
Run out to a cone 30m away, hit the deck, get up and run back.
Cycle through this non-stop for 12 minutes
Another favourite involves placing 5 cones 10 metres apart.
Cone 1 – 12 squats
Cone 2 – 12 push-ups
Cone 3 – 12 sit-ups
Cone 4 – 12 straddles
Cone 5 – 12 burpees
Then run back to the 1 cone and decrease the reps by 2 each round until you’re down to 2.
This should take around 8 minutes.
3. ‘Gym Bro’ Heavy Weights Session
Type: Strength Training
Location: Gym – Coogee Diggers
Total Workout Time = 1 Hour
A few times a week I’ll head to the gym and clang some iron around for a bit.
The warm-up is always the same (detailed in minute, erm, detail here), leaning on the Dan John philosophy that “the warm-up is the workout” (or, at least, the start of it).
I’ll then do some kind of full-body workout or a variant on the classic “push / pull / leg” split” (which is handily detailed here).
Because I’m working out on the sand most days, my legs get pretty taxed there and are sometimes neglected in the gym a bit.
4. Dumbbell Strength Conditioning
Type: Dumbbell Complexes
Location: Beach or Backyard
Total Workout Time (inc warm-up) = 45 Minutes
Not dissimilar to workout #1 (above), except the focus is dumbbell complexes.
A complex is just a series of different exercises done one after the other. It could look like this:
10 deadlifts
10 clean & press
10 squats
10 bicep curls
10 tricep extensions
10 single arm snatches (alternating)
This is one round.
If we’re on the beach, we might follow this by running out and back 40m.
If the whole things takes 3 minutes 30 seconds, we might go every 5 minutes for 4 rounds (for a total of 20 minutes)
This is brutally effective, especially as you start to increase the dumbbell weight.
5. Football (or Soccer, urgh)
Type: Cardio Conditioning / Sprints
Location: Local Park
Total Workout Time: 1 Hour
During the football off-season I’ll keep my hand (or foot) in with a solid one hour “kickabout” on a Saturday morning.
But make no mistake, this is a competitive run-out that will burn around 1,000 calories.
Summary
And that’s a wrap, folks.
Aside from a couple of classes I jumped into at 98 Gym (which were fantastic, I’d highly recommend them) during a one week trial, these were the only workouts I did for pretty much 4 months straight.
If you’re a time-poor Dad trying to shift body fat and build muscle, you could do a lot worse than follow a program like this, borrowing heavily from the Martin Rooney / Training For Warriors maxim of ‘Sprint & Lift Heavy,’ as it does.
You’ll note there’s not an iota of steady-state cardio in this program and a whole lot of weight (or resistance) training, which seems to be just what us older guys (and by that I mean anyone over 35, basically) require and should be a straight-up non-negotiable.
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