Customer Reviews

Cardio Strength Training: Torch Fat, Build Muscle, and Get Stronger Faster

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The book is packed with info that will work to help get you in the best shape of your life without spending hours in the gym. These are proven principles. The publisher should have taken more time to proof read the book. It is filled with errors. One exercise with description has pictures of a different exercise, there are other parts that are made confusing because the wrong word is used (40:20 Timed Intervals is listed in one part as 40 seconds work: 20 seconds of work. It should be 40 seconds work: 20 seconds rest.) If you have some workout experience it is not a problem, but a beginner could be easily confused in some areas. The book apparently came out a few weeks earlier than had been planned. It looks like it was rushed for release before Christmas. They should have taken the extra time to correct the errors. Still overall a great exercise book that everybody can benefit from. You could use the info from the book to create effective workouts for a long time.

I will confirm that the book has some errors. So yeah, shame on the publisher for making Coach Dos look like a dweeb. If it were up to me I would make the publishers do 100 complexes of elevated push up with jumping dumbbell burpees for every error they made. That'll pump some blood and improve their brain function :)

If you are an experienced lifter, the errors can easily be overlooked (they're almost negligible, to be honest). If you are a newbie, I would highly recommend that you join the Coach's forum on [...] . Even if you are an experienced lifter you should also join. There are lots of great info on his forum. He is also one heck of great guy, always willing to answer questions even if they are multiple repeats.

Anyway, aside from the errors (again not the Coach's fault), I still give the info contained within this book a five star for the following reasons:

A) The book is easy to follow. It has different levels, catered to the individual's fitness level. The book has many suggestions for beginner, intermediate and advanced trainee. NO cookie cutter, one-size fits all approach here.

B) The reasoning behind the book's methods of zapping fat is backed up with solid science. It's NOT some cult-fit (**cough** I mean crossfit) "slap-a-roo" garbage that make you do meaningless stuff just for the sake of doing meaningless stuff. CST is based on solid science.

C) It's a stand alone program. If your primary goal is to lose fat, this book is all you need. Although I would still recommend Men's Health Power Training because once you become lean thru CST, you would want to do other protocol to keep improving.

Alright, as far as my real-world experience with this stuff: I performed CST protocol on one of my days off from Power Training. It only took me 15 minutes to do the workout. I am a pretty experienced lifter, so I followed an advanced suggestion. Fifteen minutes later, I looked at my heart rate monitor and it registered at 101%. That's right, over one hundred percent. If I were not athletic, my heart would probably have blown out. I'm not saying this to scare you. I am sharing my experience to inform you that Coach Dos' program IS THAT INTENSE! In fact, I did CST at 5:00 AM and that very same day during break time at 10:00 AM I went to my company's health and wellness coach to measure my blood pressure. BP was normal. But she panicked when she measured my heart rate at 90 BPM! I tried to explain to the wellness coach that it was probably high due to the "afterburn" affect of CST which I did 5 hours earlier. Talk about intensity!

Another story I would like to share. I am a part-time personal trainer. My brother-in-law asked me to give him a good cardio program. I told him to meet me at the house on Tuesday night at 6:30 PM. Come around 6:50 PM he came literally close to vomiting. I kid you not! And I only gave him a beginner protocol.

Guys and gals, forget low intensity steady state on the elliptical or treadmill. If you are not a gym member and you would much rather workout in your basement, that is perfectly fine. I would suggest that you save your money on a good heart rate monitor, some kettlebells, dumbbells, and / or Olympic barbell, follow this program and watch your fat melt right off. If you are already a gym member, that's great too! Just go to the corner of your gym's massive "cardio room" full of worthless LISS equipment and do CST. People on treadmill and elliptical will stare at you. Let them, because they (and you) will literally see the fat melt off in no time (just as long as you nutritional intake is in check - remember you still have to create caloric deficit).

The book basically has the following protocols:

o Complex

o Density Training

o Timed Interval

o Tabata

All you need is no more than 20 minutes. It is not easy. It's not supposed to be. If it were easy, the US of A would not have an obese pandemic.

Good luck. You will need it as you cross the treshold of death! Ha ha ha.

At long last a straight forward, simple and easy to understand workout plan to build muscle and lose fat. I found the complex and timed sets to be the most interesting and even have seen similar programs being sold for lots more money. I did one timed workout and burned 775 calories! I have never been able to do this without collapsing to the floor first [which I did at the end anyway with this program]. I especially like that the author offers barbell, dumbbell and body weight variations of each workout. If you're serious about keeping fit and don't have tons of time, you need this book. You will never workout the same again.

As a certified hard-style Kettlebell instructor, student-athlete / personal trainer, and aspiring strength coach, I very much looked forward to reading this book. When it comes to the meat of the text I was not disappointed--the information provided is practical, pragmatic, and seemingly effective. I enjoyed reading it more than Kenneth Jay's Viking Warrior Conditioning, but obviously a text as this is not as comprehensive as a tome like Coach Boyle's Advances in Functional Training or Gray Cook's Athletic Body in Balance. Nor does it need to be--the book drills into the specifics of "cardio strength training" and details how and when to apply these techniques.

While the text of the book was generally well done, the Kettlebell form is fairly poor, and many of the exercises (KB or bodyweight) are often not described very well. For example, a pushup is described as "These are standard, full range-of-motion pushups"--not very helpful for coaches or advanced athletes always looking to improve their form. The kettlebell swing is taught as the squat-style swing, which many Kettlebell instructors feel is much more dangerous than the moving deadlift-style swing. The push press kettlebell pictures don't make sense--why is the clean so far away from the body, and note how the fitness model lets his wrist collapse as he demonstrates the windmill. This is highly unsafe!!

I performed the advanced Kettlebell complex using double 12kg 'bells the day after I bought the book, and Coach Dos was right, this is tough stuff! However, double kettlebell work is fairly advanced, and there is simply not enough explanation in the text to easily progress to these lifts. I wish Coach Dos had consulted with a KB expert or two to write a chapter/section specifically on KB lifting, as he has done for BBs in his previous Power Training book.

If the next edition were to have kettlebell drills demonstrated by a certified instructor, I would then highly recommend this book and give it five stars. Double kettlebell lift complexes done with poor form? No thanks. For DB and BB practitioners, this book is great, but for Kettlebell lifters, you need to read between the lines, even if you have attended multiple high-level Kettlebell certification and training programs as I have, and done all of the Kettlebell lifts described prior to reading the book.

If you are new to the idea of crosttraining, or combining cardio into your daily lifting program, than this is a great book for you. It introduces very functional exercises for athletes of all sports and not on the tradiitonal exercises that will do little for you when it comes to performance (bench press, bicep curl, etc).

For those already exposed, this book does not introduce many NEW exercises and the workouts arent very challenging unless combined with others. Of course, being said, any workout is only as challenging as you are willing to make it.

If you are into crosstraining, but cannot find the motivation to create your own workouts, then buy this book. If you do not need to know the fundamentals, i would suggest taking another route. Hope this helps.

Coach Dos seems to be leading the race for innovations in the strength and conditioning industry. This book is the perfect example of that edge that he has over the rest. At no point during his career, has he remained educational stagnant. Instead, he continually experiments and finds new ways to excel his athletes. We readers are lucky that he documents and shares his findings with the rest of the world. Cardio Strength Training is epitome of these last statements. This easy to follow and understandable guide allows anyone to implement new age metabolic fitness strategies that are appropriate for anyone. Not just for athletes, these workouts are extremely time-efficient, which is perfect for the Average Joe who works the daily grind and only has 30-40 minutes to workout. In fact, with some of the protocols in this book, that may be too much time. As Dos so eloquently puts it, get out there and "DO WORK!"

Readers of Coach Dos's (I use the shortened name here because everybody else does and I want to be cool too) earlier book "Men's Health Power Training" won't need much convincing Dos has another winner here. But not just previous fans...everybody interested in improving the effectiveness of their workouts should take a look at the concepts presented in this book. Coach Dos takes the pioneering work of Romanian weight-lifting coach Istvan Javorek on "complexes" etc. (i.e., stacking exercises back-to-back, usually compound multi-muscle or whole-body moves which produce the largest metabolic afterburn), and shows you how to construct workouts that tax both the anaerobic and aerobic pathways at the same time. Performing workouts using these concepts allows one to complete a tremendous amount of work in the shortest possible time. For purposes of body fat transformations, this methodology is simpy unbeatable. No wonder you're seeing this "metabolic strength training" everywhere these days- from Hollywood trainers, to TV shows (i.e., Biggest Loser, etc.) down to your local fitness gyms. It's the current cutting-edge of fitness, simply because it is a highly effective way to train.

Personally, I first started experimenting with strength circuits, stacking exercises back-to-back, after reading an article some time ago on "Meltdown Training" by Don Alessi on the T-Nation website (T-Nation is a great source for strength training wisdom and workouts anyway...everybody should have this site bookmarked or be stupid). Iron heads will no doubt remember Meltdown Training and programs like it fondly (Alessi gave several versions), for its brutal demands (brutal if you weren't used to this type of training, which many of us weren't) and for the results it produced. However, the program wasn't meant to be continued past a month or so and many of us moved back to more conventional workouts. Nonetheless, here we are with some of the same "metabolic" principles of strength circuit training, refined and expanded, tweaking with variables such as increased work within a given set of time, plyometric fast-twitch additions, adding the big Olympic lifts, etc. etc. Folks should always be searching for new ways to do things and do them better, and hence seeing these "metabolic conditioning" concepts extended and and refined gives me (and anyone else) something novel in a search for more effective ways to train...not to mention, adding some (needed) variety to conventional weight workouts AND to one's cardio work.

Not only complexes, but other cool tools for torching body fat are presented here, such as "density" training. Coach Charles Staley certainly wasn't the first guy to teach a "density" protocol, but his Escalating Density Training (EDT) was probably responsible for bringing the density concept back onto center stage. Staley's EDT usually pairs a couple compound exercises alternated for a given period of time, with the idea of constantly attempting to increase the total amount of work done within that period (i.e., increasing the "density"). It's another winner in creating a large metabolic disturbance, and therefore adds an effective arsenal in one's bag of tricks to maximize effectiveness of workouts. Coach Dos's way to do density sessions is to stack 5 exercises from different categories of movement (read the book), start the clock for 10-15-20 minute sessions, and see how many circuits you can complete in the given time period. This kind of setup is guaranteed to tax even the fittest trainee to fatigue, which translates into a huge amount of post-exercise metabolic disturbance (what elite fitness-trainer Alwyn Cosgrove terms "afterburn")...if your chest isn't heaving and your entire body isn't exhausted at the end of these sessions, you're simply not doing it properly. As Coach Dos says in the book, nobody said it would be easy... :-). But what a way to burn fat in the shorest amount of time!

Speaking of Alwyn Cosgrove, he says something intriguing in his forward to the book: "What science hasn't proven yet is that a strength training - interval training hybrid outperforms both strength and interval training when practiced independently." True enough, I doubt anyone can find any clinical studies done on a "metabolic strength training" protocol in the current literature. Its popularity is still a relatively recent phenomenon, at least outside of athletics and certain fitness trainers, and I don't think many in the research lab crowd have caught on yet... And let's be honest here, elite fitness trainers are usually light-years ahead of the researchers, who -judging by the often corny exercise protocols one typically finds in the exercise physiology literature - may not do much working out themselves. But Cosgrove's assertion certainly makes logical sense to me- the problem with, say, orthodox weight training is a lack of high cardiovascular effect (especially with longer rest periods working with maximal loads); and the problem with orthodox high-intensity cardio (i.e., HIIT "sprint"-type exertion) is that while this protocol has been found to be tremendously effective, it is still limited in some ways depending on the piece of equipment used...sprints on a track, treadmills, exercise bikes, ellipticals, etc. tend to involve the lower body much more than the upper body. Ideally, one would want to target the entire body on an equal basis, yes? Another weakness of orthodox HIIT is that, while it does directly hit the fast-twitch fibers (mainly in the legs), you're simply not getting the same effect as with resistance training on various muscle groups, which has a contraction and eccentric lengthening component that is impossible to reproduce solely by fast repetitive motions like sprints. Think about this. And sprint-type training doesn't produce nearly the same amount of (desirable) microscopic muscle tissue damage-and-repair that resistance exercise directly produces, which is responsible for re-building lean muscle tissue. So, to sum up, there are limitations on both modalities (weights or cardio). So it makes sense, at least from the standpoint of getting optimal results in the shortest amount of time, to perform some protocols along this line which involve the entire body, producing results which simultaneously delivers both whole-body resistance training AND the cardio effects of conventional HIIT intervals.

About the only problem I have with the book is much of the content is devoted to generic full-page photos of each exercise, including Coach Dos's warm-up routine. While I understand the need to give pics of the exercises in the workouts (especially for inexperienced lifters), at least the book could have been arranged so the pics took much less space. What this does is make the actual meat of the book too small. However, Coach Dos does give plenty of workout ideas for anyone to get going, and many folks reading this stuff probably already are fairly experienced and will have no trouble constructing their own workouts.

Four stars here, one away from perfection because of the book's rather sloppy organization. But a great fitness book...take these concepts and run with 'em!

Good solid resource for lay people. I am a fitness professional with my own clientele that includes normal folks, kids, and athletes of various ages. I found some new exercises and exercise combinations to use in designing training programs. I expected to find some really unique stuff, but can't say that I did.

That said, Robert Dos Remedios has a great reputation in our industry. I don't think you can go wrong purchasing this unless you are a seasoned pro already.

The nice thing abouut this book is that if you aren't on your knees in between sets feeling like your about to die and wishing you could be anywhere else other than what you're doing, then you aren't doing the exercises right.

It's a face paced, explosive packed program that will whip your ass into shape. I'm 43 and I started with Coach Dos Mens Health Power Training years ago. I bought CST just a few months ago and it's taken my fitness level even further. I can do more over the age of 40 than I could at 30. Coach, wish you were around in my 20's.

Do yourself a favor and throw all those "it's easy!" programs away. In order to change you will have to feel discomfort and pain. And that's the fun in it anyway. Who wants to do it easy? Not me.

This book is excellent and easy to follow. I have the Bowflex SelectTech Dumbbells which makes weight changes quick so you move through each circuit very smoothly.

DO WORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am not going to go into too much detail because I would just be repeating much of what has already been said. But...

The editing is insanely bad. There are not just typos, but much bigger layout problems--sections of text are repeated or placed in the wrong order, tables are in the wrong place (i.e. text will refer to the table below when it is in fact at the top of the page), and some pictures are missing. The way the book is put together is such an amateurish hack-job that it is amazing that it found its way to print. I would say that Rodale Books must be run by trained chimps, but that would insult the chimps.

Aside from the editing, I actually like the workouts a lot, and I think the book provides some good information. With a bit of time (and a critical eye to weed through the various sources of information) one could find all of this information on the internet for free, though. Of course, it is easier (and maybe a bit more trustworthy) to get all the info from this one book--so if the book were put together in a halfway respectable manner, I would probably recommend it.