By now, if you’ve read my other posts here, you’re bound to know that I’m a huge fan of circuit training as one of the best ways to lose weight fast, building muscle, and eliminating the need for doing traditional ‘cardio’ (thank goodness!). But I know some of y’all are probably still wondering just how this circuit training stuff works…

It’s simple really. So simple you’re gonna slap your forehead when I tell you.

When you lift a moderately heavy weight for a lot of reps, aren’t you breathing hard at the end of the set? Especially if you’re doing big, compound lifts?

(You know, squats, presses, rows, swings, and the like.)

Heck yeah you are.

Well, take that huffing and puffing you’re doing, and just repeat it. And repeat it. And repeat it. And repeat it. And then do it one last time. And then maybe again…just for good measure.

All of a sudden, you know what’s happened? You’ve been huffing and puffing like a freight train for an entire workout. Just like you might with "cardio"…only with all the lifting, you’re getting a ton of other benefits at the same time. (The stuff I keep telling you about – strength, power, endurance, etc.)

Besides, think about doing all this work in a relatively short period of time. Think that ain’t gonna burn a metric crap-ton of calories? Darn right it is…which is gonna lead to losing weight…and pronto.

So why do the circuit training instead of just a bunch of straight sets with a bunch of exercises?

Well, when you do circuit training, you’re stacking a bunch of exercises together back to back without rest. By doing that, you can let part of your body rest, while the body as a whole has to still work.

So, if you do presses then rows then squats, your shoulder girdle works first, but then rests the rest of the circuit, right? Well, by the time the next set comes around, your shoulders are ‘rested’ but your body was still working as a whole, and you were still breathing heavy the whole time.

See what I mean? It’s doing all the same kinds of work, but with literally a fraction of the rest.

How much work you can do goes through the roof…and again, you’re huffing and puffing the entire time. Which means you’re gonna have better cardio…and burn more calories.

Then there’s the post-workout benefits. See, this kinda workout jacks up your metabolism something crazy, so your body is still burning calories LONG after the workout is over.

But you can’t just slap a bunch of exercises together and call it a circuit. You gotta do it the right way, or else you’re gonna jack it all up.

You gotta make sure you use exercises that fit together, with set and rep schemes that work, making sure that when you use the same weight for all the exercises that you’re in a work range that will still get max results. Then there’s when to progress and when to back off. Then there’s how to build up from never having done complexes at all to being able to crank them out like a madman.

It’s not just about picking a bunch of exercises outta hat, and doing them all for a bunch of reps. There is a TON more to it than that.