TOP 5 Exercises That Hit ALL Major Muscle Groups for Faster Fat Loss

These five exercises are like rocket fuel to your fat loss plan and will save you a ton of time, too. All you need are some dumbbells and you can do this anywhere. But first, let me explain why they work so well. So, resistance training is mission critical for fat loss, for insulin sensitivity and for giving carbohydrates a place to go. You want them to be stored as glycogen in your muscles rather than be stored as fat. The deal is your muscle is a sugar spice sponge. So if you're doing resistance training while you're cutting calories, this is going to help you maintain your muscle mass. The other thing you have to do, of course, is ensure that you're getting optimal protein. And this is where I want you to track and make sure that you eat your protein first so you get it in and figure out how much protein you need. I'm going to put my protein calculator below so that you'll nail it. Now, here's the deal. Muscle requires a lot of energy to go through muscle protein turnover. It breaks down, it builds up. I like to call muscle your metabolic Spanx because of that metabolic effect and because it holds everything in tighter. As I take you through these exercises, what you're going to notice is that they're all compound movements, multiple joints. Why is that? Because when you're using multiple joints, you're using more energy. And plus, when you're doing these things, you're going to get a natural core workout. Remember, we train not so that we're better at the gym. We train so that we're better at life. So I've divided the body into four different areas. Upper body pushing. So upper body pushing are things that work your chest, your shoulders and your triceps. Upper body pulling those work your lats, your shoulders and your biceps. Hip hinging, which works your thighs and your glutes and your calves. And then power core that works your abs and your back. But here's what you got to promise me. Do not ever sacrifice form for the amount of weight. Technique is everything. Ideally, you're working with a trainer or you're doing this in front of a mirror so you can really assess your form. If you don't have access to, you can always use your phone and you can videotape yourself so you can check things out. So we are going to start with the squat. Now, the squat is probably one of the most functional exercises that you'll ever do, right? Because think about it, in life, what do we need to do? We need to get up out of chairs, out of cars, off the toilet. That's a squat. And so the squat is definitely one that I want you to do. Now, there are some modifications if you have knee or back issues, and I will show you those too. But very simple thing. When you're doing a squat, you are going to focus. You're going to be using your quads, you're going to be using your glutes, but also you've got to be really using your abs, pulling your belly button to your spine, and you're going to also be using your back because you're going to keep your chest up and you're going to be extended. So I have my hips shoulder width apart, my toes pointed forward. My knees are going to follow my toes. I like to put my hands here. I dream of genie style. Or you can bring them all the way up. But the most important thing here is you're opening up your chest and you're looking slightly above. That's your sight line. And then you are sitting back down and driving into your heels. Now, if you can't get all the way down to begin with, do not worry about that. And if you're a little bit freaked out about sitting back, like, you might just keep going, just put a chair back there. And that could be a great way to start, is just have a chair, touch the chair, come back up. That's an easy way to start with a squat. Now, if you've got knee or back problems, you. The way you can do a variation here is that you can take one of those exercise balls, put it against the wall, lean back against it, and now you've got your back protected and your knees protected as you go. But here's the deal again. In life, you're going to have to get out of things that are going to require that, that back strength, the glute strength, the leg strength. So as quickly as possible, start to work and just work into better ranges of motion. So how do you make this heavier? You can put a barbell on your back. You can put a barbell on your front as a front squat. You can hold dumbbells down here, just don't swing them. Or you can hold dumbbells on your shoulders. Those are all ways you can make this harder if you need to. Right? So remember, we do progressive exercise. And there's one thing that you can do to do a power variation of this. Now, this could be done with a dumbbell, or it can be done with a kettlebell. This is a little kettlebell. And we'll talk later about, about how hard you should go with power, but just a little power exercise that you can do here is to reach down and come up, down and come up. Another way that you can do a power movement with a squat, just come down and jump up, down and jump up. So there's a couple different ways we can incorporate some power in here as well. So that is the squat. I'm going to show you a deadlift, but I'm going to do a different variation on the deadlift because I'm going to do what's called a stiff legged deadlift. And I'm going to show you how I teach it first and then I'm going to show you how to do it with dumbbells. And then you're going to keep your knees soft, slightly bent, not locked. And what you do is just go down your legs and you only go as far as you can keep your back extended. The minute your curve, you're done. So that might be here. Depending on how, how loose your hamstrings are, how flexible you are, it might be a little bit lower, but you can only go as far as you keep your chest extended. Extended. You do not swing your hands, so your hands draw towards your body and down. But because I'm not bending and straining my legs, I'm not really letting my quads do the work. I'm making it happen from my glutes and from my hamstrings, which can be hard at home to really get that hamstring work in. Okay, so now I'm going to show you how to do this with dumbbells. And again, chest is up, back is extended. Think of that pole coming out the top of your head. So as I do this, I reach back with my tailbone, I arch my back, I slide my hands down my knees, My legs stay slightly bent. I'm only going as low as I can with my back extended. I feel that stretch in my hamstrings. When I come up, I'm squeezing, pull my shoulders back and I'm squeezing my glutes. The next thing that we're going to do is a bent over row. Now again, I said that you train to get better at life, not to get better at the gym. And, and I love a bent over row because it is such a functional activity. This is you getting the groceries out of the car. Remember when we used to do that before the days of Instacart? What you're going to do is you're going to bend over. And I always call this like shortstop position. And you should have so much of your weight from your hands on your knees that if someone did that, you'd fall. From here, you're extending your chest out, you've got your knees bent. Pull your belly button in. So I'm using my core. Drop your hands. Your hands are going to face your knees and then you're going to lift up and frame your rib cage and bring it back down. And as I'm doing that, I'm squeezing my shoulder blades together again. Short stop, drop, never drop. If you have to round your back, you have to go up a little bit. You have to keep your back extended. And then I'm going to bring my palms towards my ribs, bring it back down, Palms to my ribs, bring it back down. So you could use a chair at home to do this. This is very simple. And what I teach people to do, I see this done at the gym. Wrong all the time, makes me crazy, is don't put your knee up on something. Make yourself like a tripod. So I've got one hand and my feet. And then all you're going to do is drop this hand and pull it up. So in this way my back is protected. I'm still doing the same movement, but it's not going to be anywhere near as hard on my core and my spine. But what you can do to start to get better here is just don't put too much weight on that hand. And then ideally, at some point you're doing it again, right, or both of them. But this is a good way to start if you need to take a little bit of the weight off your back. Now we are going to do upper body pushing with a push up. A push up is one of the easiest things to modify because you can literally do this against a wall. You can do it against the kitchen countertop, you can do it on your knees and you can do it on your hands. I'm going to show you just on the ground, the different variations you can do. Here's the easiest way to do this is to start from a tabletop position. Remember, the more weight that's over your hands, the harder this gets. So I like to start. Teach someone to start this. My hands are wider than my shoulders because if they're in real close, it becomes more of a tricep exercise. If they're wider out, it becomes becomes more of a chest exercise. So my hands wide, I've got my back extended. Remember the stick that we talked about before? Belly button to spine? And I don't have A lot of weight over my arms. Right now I'm doing more of a tabletop push up to make it a little bit harder. We just walk forward now. See what happened? I brought more of my body weight over my hands. That just made it harder. But what you don't want to do is this. This is not what we're doing. That's not a push up, right? So you want to make sure that you've got your back long, your belly button pulled to your spine. And this is not moving. This is moving. And we're coming all the way down and up. All the way down and up. You can come up on your toes and go next, all the way down and up. And overhead presses. I like to do standing because when you do this, you're going to axial load your spine, right? Super important. Now you probably have seen people do a military press like this. This is not what I want you to do because you have a little bursa here in your AC joint that gets smushed. That's a scientific term when you do that. So instead I want you to be in this position. Thumbs are pointing towards my shoulders. Okay? So I'm going to show you in this position. Knees are a little bent, belly button to spine, thumbs towards your shoulders. Push up. You should, when you're doing this right, be able to see your hands in your view. So again, thumbs towards the shoulders. Pushing up, bringing down, pushing up, bringing down. When you go to do each exercise, you are going to do sets of an exercise. Each set has repetitions. So let's say that you're doing overhead presses. Every time you do one, that's a repetition. A group of those repetitions is a set. Okay? The first time you do the exercise, do it very light. So let's say you're going to do overhead presses. And your final weight is 15 pound dumbbells in each hand. Start with 5 pounds in each hand and just do a warm up set. Get your body going. Oh, yeah, this is what we're doing. Focus on the muscles that you know are being used. Think about cranking them up, firing them up. So your first set is a warm up set. And notice that I'm going through full range of motion because that stretch is really important for strength. And you know, we used to think, oh, people who lift weights a lot are not as flexible. Not true. When you do full range of motion, you improve your flexibility. Once you've done that warmup set, you're going to do two to three sets of six to 30 repetitions. That's a huge range. But that whole range is what we call the hypertrophy or muscle building range. The deal is in any of that range, you have to get to the point where you're close to failure, where you really feel like you couldn't do another couple. So I like to work in the 8 to 12 range because 30 is awful. If you're one of those people that likes to do lighter weights longer, then you would go to 30, but either which way, what you need to do is I tell people if you are doing an 8 to 12 repetition set, if you can't get to 8, lighten the load and if you can go past 12, pick up the load. So that's what I look at is I want to know what, when I get to the point of where I'm going to be done, say if I'm working in 8 to 12 or 8 to 15, by that last one, I should feel like I really can't do another one. And that is super important. Then I'm going to take a one to two minute rest. So you're going to do each of these body parts two to three times a week. The deal is you shouldn't be overly sore. Like you shouldn't be sore to the touch or sore more than a day or two, or sore at a joint scratch sight. And remember, you always choose good form over heavier weight. Now what I just described to you is what we call a muscle building or hypertrophy program. As we age, we lose our muscle size, we lose our muscle strength and we lose our muscle power. And in fact, we lose more strength and power than just size. So what I like to do once every two weeks is I throw in a strength set where I will do one to five reps and I'll do five sets of that, three to five sets of that, and I'll give myself a three minute rest in between. So I'm doing way heavier. And I always have a spotter or I have someone there to help me, right? Or I use a machine at the gym, but that can help you with that strength side of it. And then once a week I like to throw in a little bit of a power move like I showed you with the squat and the power moves, you know where in strength you're going super heavy, in power you're going to go light, probably about 40% of what that one repetition max is because you're adding in some speed, right? That's what power is, that explosive stuff. And I want you to make sure you're monitoring your Progress. And here's the thing, don't do that by stepping on a scale because you might step on the scale and go, what the heck? This isn't working. I'm getting bigger. Remember, muscle is metabolic Spanx. It holds everything in tighter. But muscle weighs more than fat and so muscle takes a while to grow. It can kind of be like watching grass grow. Like set a goal of of a pound a month. But you want to monitor your progress with a bioimpedance scale. It's not perfect, it's not as good as a Dexa, but it's way better than the scale. And you're really looking to improve your total body water and look at the average over a week. And again, let's like set a goal of a pound a month would be amazing. And fat loss of like two pounds a week. As you improve your muscle quality and strength, you're going to improve your muscle your insulin sensitivity that's going to help you lose fat. The other thing you need to make sure of is that you are supporting your muscles with the protein and also with creatine. I take 5 grams of creatine monohydrate every day. I also am a big fan of timelines mitipure because that helps with my muscle clean out. It triggers mitophagy and fish oil can help too. It can be anabolic. Now, once you get into your new workout routine, you're going to want to monitor your progress with a bioimpedance scale. These are great tools for giving you loads of data, but how do you know what all the metrics mean and more importantly, what to do with them? Well, I explain all of this, including how to find and track your healthy body fat percentage, how often you should weigh and measure, and what to eat to keep seeing results right here in the next video. So stay tuned. Sam.