Ok, I finally found a couple of hours to thoroughly review Afterburn. It confirmed my opinion that Alwyn Cosgrove is a mad genius when it comes to program design. It's simple, elegant and effective. Every workout involves your whole body and burns major calories, both while you're doing it and in the hours afterward. You're not going to waste any time lounging between sets or sitting on a machine trying to isolate your pinkie toe.  

The book starts off with the clearest and most entertaining explanation that I have ever seen of why aerobic exercise sucks for fat loss. When I was done laughing, I jumped from my chair and ran for a highlighter. He includes examples that I will save and use the next time I'm trying to coax an aerobics bunny out of that damn "fat burning zone" that's reflected on cardio machines and heart rate monitors. In the opening chapter, he also discusses metabolism, calorie expenditure, and EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) otherwise known as the reason you burn more body fat after challenging cardio intervals or heavy weight circuits. I'm reasonably certain that my fast metabolism and insane calorie requirements come from the fact that I've been doing intense cardio intervals and heavy total body circuit routines for years. Even though I associate with plenty of bodybuilder types, I was never totally sold on the idea of splitting my training days up by body part and sitting around resting in between sets. Apparently, it's a good thing!

He lays out a cardio plan (a.k.a., energy system routine) where you never do the same cardio activity two workouts in a row. In addition to switching machines and methods, the interval pattern also changes every four weeks, gradually increasing both in length and in the number of days performed.

The strength training starts off deceptively simple looking and every four weeks it builds. He has you doing supersets in a circuit format. As you progress, the number of exercises in the circuit increases, the rest periods shorten, the moves become more explosive, and the number of workouts per week increases. I'm reasonably certain that about fourteen weeks into this, you'll be wanting to kill him. Well, you'll love him when you look in the mirror, but you'll want to kill him when you go from doing explosive push-ups to Bulgarian split squats to god knows what else with all of your rest periods eliminated. He includes some really crazy and creative exercises that will wreck your whole body.

He doesn't specifically discuss this, but one thing I noticed about his routines is that he puts upper and lower body exercises back to back with no rest between them, which forces your heart to pump blood back and forth from upper to lower extremities (peripheral heart action). It burns an insane number of calories and reduces lactic acid build-up so you can do a greater volume of work. Lucky you!

His wife Rachel Cosgrove handles the nutrition portion of the book. She has abs like Batman, and you all know I don't listen to nutrition advice from anybody unless I've seen their abs! Rachel passes my nutrition writer bikini test with flying colors. The nutrition is periodized over the sixteen weeks just like the workouts. It starts off gently and ends with a pre-contest diet that will rip you to shreds. In the beginning, it's only a modest calorie reduction and you're still able to eat up to 50% carbs, then over time you tighten it up and start calorie and carb cycling. I will say that it's not for the wishy-washy or the unmotivated. If you cheat on this plan, you're actually cheating. There aren't any built-in allowances for it. You have to be willing to track your food and do some math and make some sacrifices. However, the reward is 16-32 pounds of fat gone from your body. They don't call it "extreme fat loss training" for nothing.

It's a spiral bound book, no frills, no fluff. There isn't a bunch of rah-rah motivational stuff. There are no recipes, no color pictures, no stories about their childhoods. It gets right down to the business of fat burning. It does include clear photos and explanations of every exercise, and also one sample day of meals for each of the nutrition adjustments. If you consider how much it would cost to have a trainer design you a sixteen week periodized routine, show you all of the exercises, and customize a nutrition plan, it's a bargain. It's less than the cost of a single hour with a trainer.

Drawbacks, if there are any, would be that he doesn't include alternate exercises if you don't have access to a particular piece of equipment. You'll need dumbbells, barbells, a bench, a tall step, and a stability ball, but he also includes a few cable machine moves like lat pull-downs and pully rows. If you don't have a gym membership, you could probably substitute some of those moves with resistance bands, assisted pull-ups, or different row variations. Check out the exercise and muscle directory for a slew of exercise ideas. Just click on a muscle group to the right and it will give you an assortment of dumbbell, barbell, cable, lever, assisted, and body weight variations.

So, I definitely enjoyed Afterburn. It reinforced what I know to be true about the power of intervals and circuits. It's also honest about what it takes nutritionally to get really lean and see abs. If you want to lose fat and achieve muscle definition in a moderate, maintainable, flexible way with no math and lots of treats, that's entirely possible but you'd better be damned patient. If you're thinking, "screw patience" and you want fat to literally fly off of your body every week, you have to get considerably more hardcore with the diet. Put that hardcore diet together with a metabolism blasting exercise routine and look out! I also love the fact that he didn't just dream this up and decide that it looked good on paper. He's actually used this approach with thousands of personal training clients over the years and knows from experience that it delivers rapid results.

Update: I've now done Afterburn myself with great results! If you have any questions about it, feel free to e-mail me.

Some thoughts and observations in no particular order:

You'll recall that my goal was to maintain my weight while getting a little leaner and stronger. Tip: You can't maintain your weight while doing something called "extreme fat loss training."

I did not follow the Afterburn nutrition. It's sound and effective, but damned if I was willing to count calories ever again as long as I live. I ate enough to feed a small horse (or perhaps a large pony) and I still lost fat. If your workouts cause you to burn fat even when you’re not exercising, and your nutrition maximizes your metabolism instead of squashing it, you can lose fat even though the numbers wouldn’t seem to support it.

In that last paragraph, I nearly said that you can lose fat “easily” or “effortlessly” but I caught myself. This has not been easy or effortless. Alwyn Cosgrove is nuts. The last month of his program is filled with insane exercises, four killer total body strength workouts a week, and five, count ‘em, FIVE 28 minute HIIT sessions a week. And for me, that’s on top of martial arts training. By the time I scraped myself through the last few workouts on this program, I was seeing colors and having visions of my ancestors. Grandma, is that you?

The thing that impresses me the most about Afterburn is that I was already fit, already training hard, already eating well, not making any kind of deliberate attempt at a calorie deficit, and I still lost fat. It does ramp up your metabolism and blast fat exactly as promised. I’m sure that if I had any inclination to actually diet and follow the Afterburn diet protocol, it would have dropped me into single digit body fat, no problem.

The workouts look deceptively simple on paper. I remember reading the first one and thinking, that’s all? Then I did it and I thought, that’s all? Then I woke up the next day and I felt like I’d been in a farm machinery accident. I was duly impressed.

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