Get Pumped With Mario Lopez

May 12, 2008 — -- When he co-starred as Bayside High's resident good guy jock, A.C. Slater, on the sitcom "Saved by the Bell," Mario Lopez, had an enviable, fit physique. Now, the actor has written a new book, along with fitness expert Jeff O'Connell, to help people get the toned and hard bodies of their dreams.

"Mario Lopez's Knockout Fitness" is geared toward having fun while working out, and positions itself as an easy-to-use exercise book. With 10-minute tone-ups and healthier lifestyle tips, the book uses a three-phase program to help readers get results. Check out an excerpt of the book below.

Form Meets Function

Check this out: I've been training now for going on two decades! So it shouldn't come as a surprise that my daily workouts, while a heck of a lot of fun, are fairly advanced and quite demanding. For many of you, those workouts would be impossible to ace right off the bat, and perhaps even unsafe, given their degree of difficulty. What we need to do is build you up to my level in a way that maximizes effectiveness, ensures safety—and guarantees that you have a blast in the process. Because if you're not having fun, you'll never stick with it. That's Mario's Rule of Fitness. For those of you with at least some training experience, the Mario Lopez Knockout Fitness program lasts six weeks, divided among three two-week phases. However, complete beginners who will be entering a gym for the first time, or for the first time in a long while, will spend twice as long—four weeks—in each of the three phases, for 12 weeks total.

How do you determine your current fitness level? It can be tricky. Perhaps you think you're only a beginner, because you've only dabbled in the gym, when in fact you're actually an intermediate, perhaps because you're naturally a great athlete. The reverse can apply as well: You might not be as far along as you think. I'm going to have you determine your "training age," which in turn will determine whether you spend two or four weeks in each phase. If you've been training for at least a year, you should be in relatively good shape—fit and strong enough to spend only two weeks in each phase. If you've been training for less than a year, follow the beginner sequence: four-by-four-by-four. The intermediate and advanced people will be doing the same phases as you beginners. They'll just be moving in and out of them much more quickly.

Here's the barebones breakdown of these three phases, which I designed along with one of the leading personal trainers in the country—Joseph Dowdell, a certified strength and conditioning specialist through the National Strength and Conditioning Association, and the owner of Peak Performance gym in New York City. Joe has worked out everyone from top pro athletes to actresses and runway models.

Phase I: PRIMING THE PUMP! This prepares you for the rigors of my training style.

Phase II: FUELING THE FIRE! The emphasis here becomes burning fat and building muscle with which to sculpt.

Phase III: MAXING IT OUT! Lean out to showcase and sculpt your newfound muscle, while making further improvements in strength and power.

This six- or 12-week scheme, depending on your fitness level, allows you to build by starting off with simple lifts and body-weight moves in Phase I; moving on to more demanding moves in Phase II; and then adding some instability elements while shortening rest periods in Phase III, at which point you're training more or less like I do. Over the course of these six weeks, I'll gradually build up your strength and conditioning while introducing you to different "qualities" of training, especially power and explosiveness. Those qualities aren't just for guys, either. You need them if you want to smash a tennis ball or spike a volleyball, ladies. And I'll do it in a way that's safe, effective, and most of all, fun.

All of your fitness goals are going to be satisfied without you even telling me what they are, because we're going to hit every single area of your body to the max. No stone will be left unturned. If you want to have a great butt, you're going to have a great butt at the end of this program, even though you didn't tell me you wanted a great butt. Ditto for firm arms, a tight stomach, and every other showcase body part. About the only thing I can't guarantee is a set of dimples like mine!

That's because these aren't your run-of-the-mill, garden-variety, blah-blah-blah workouts. Not even. Cookie cutters belong in the kitchen, not in the gym. Normally, you don't see many people doing bench jumps. You don't see them doing a set of bench presses followed by medicine ball tosses. Or triple sets that include weight moves and jumping jacks. Or basketball, volleyball, or dance workouts in between their gym workouts. Uniqueness and variability are two of your watchwords over the next six or 12 weeks. That's why experienced gym goers and newbies alike will grow muscle and melt fat using this program.

Everything in this book is modular, turnkey, and fun—especially the sports sessions, which you won't find anywhere else. The workouts can be followed to the letter yet adapted to your individual needs and goals. As we proceed, I'll also explain how these phases can be expanded as needed over the next 6 or 12 weeks. Maybe your primary objective isn't leaning out, but gaining muscle. In that case, I'll explain how to shift the emphasis from cuts to a fuller muscle tone. The reverse holds true as well: If you're already as muscular as you want to be, but you want to sculpt what you possess, and become leaner along the way, I'll demonstrate how to do that as well. Throughout, I'll also show you how to use the gym workouts to improve your sports performance, and vice versa.

Along the way, every workout in this book is designed to promote balanced development, because symmetry looks good and prevents injuries for men and women alike.

Everyone who follows this program will achieve a dramatically improved fitness level. Your overall conditioning will be much higher. You'll be able to do work for longer periods of time because your endurance will have improved. You'll also notice a marked change in body composition: more lean mass, better muscle tone, less body fat. Combine those three elements, and you won't just be stopping traffic, ladies—you'll be sending it into reverse as guys crane their necks to check you out. What's more, expect improvements, perhaps dramatic ones, in your maximum strength and power. I'm talking 25 to 30 percent over six weeks for some of you.

Reflecting that, the basic framework is lifting weights and cardio three days a week. On two or three other days in a given week, you'll be performing sports-based activities that tie in smartly with those gym workouts. Above all, I like mixing it up when I bust a workout. I do a lot of different things, and I'll try pretty much everything once. I'm a big fan of surprising my body every day with something a little bit different. It does for my body what hosting does for my brain. When you never know what's coming your way, you have to stay on your toes.

That also explains the rationale behind the 10-minute workouts scattered throughout the book. These are separate from the main workouts, and they reflect as simple truth: Days will come when you don't have even 45 minutes to work out. When that happens, these mini-workouts can serve as super-fast but super-effective substitutes. They're what I use a lot when I'm traveling, or on a set that happens to have a workout trailer or some weights and maybe a treadmill scattered around.

Underlying the main program, though, are weight workouts in the gym (a.k.a. resistance training) and cardiovascular exercise (a.k.a. cardio). We're building a structure—your body, in this case—and those two elements form the foundation. You can't shape up, and you certainly can't finish this program, if you don't train both your skeletal muscles and the most important muscle of all: your ticker. Even if you've jogged but never lifted a dumbbell in your whole life, I need you to weight train along with working the cardio machines. Weights rule! It's not a macho thing; it's what exercise scientists know works the best for growing muscle and burning fat.If you don't believe me, read the latest research from a group of University of Connecticut researchers. They took a group of overweight subjects, pegged their diet to 1,500 calories a day, and then divided them among three groups. Those who did cardio and weights shed considerably more fat than both a cardio-only group and those who didn't lift a finger. That's even truer with my program, because my weight workouts are really like cardio workouts.

Other workout books take one of two approaches to weight training: old-school training vs. functional training. As the name implies, old-school training hearkens back decades, to the very beginnings of bodybuilding, a sport in which male and female athletes alike are judged based on their muscle, symmetry and conditioning. The idea here is that the human body comprises a vast array of muscles, all of which must be developed in harmony to create a balanced, aesthetically pleasing body.

This is how one of my heroes, Arnold, trained. (No last name needed, right?) While this bodybuilding-style approach takes advantage of squats, bench presses, and other exercises that recruit a whole host of muscles in order to move a weight, other exercises from the old school zero in on individual, smaller muscles, even the teeniest, tiniest ones. A seated calf raise is designed to work only calves. A barbell curl is designed to work only biceps. A cable pushdown is meant to train only triceps. In fact, the people who do these exercises will tell you that the more you isolate these smaller muscles, the better you're doing. According to them, if you're trying to work your triceps, you don't want your chest or shoulders pitching in to help. Because they're bigger and stronger, these muscles have a tendency to take over. If you took this approach to the absolute limit of human muscular development by aspiring to become Mr. or Ms. Olympia, bodybuilding judges would slash your score because your physique lacked symmetry, defined according to archetypes that Greek sculptors chiseled from marble.

Let's call the old-school trainers and athletes the isolationists.The functional-training crowd dismisses the isolationists as dinosaurs out of touch with the latest advances of modern training science. They would like nothing more than to take many of those old-school exercises and toss them out once and for all. They argue that this isn't the way you use your body in the real world, so you shouldn't train it like that in the gym, either. The functional crowd sees no need to target specific muscles. For them, everything boils down to taking those actions that your body does repeatedly as part of everyday life—stepping, pushing, pulling, squatting, and rotating—and replicating them in the gym, only with resistance or some other challenge applied.As a result, functional trainers employ barbells and dumbbells, but only for certain exercises. Most of them have never met a workout machine they liked. (As one trainer once told me, Smith machines are useful for one thing only: hanging laundry out to dry.) What they really like are pushups, chinups, and other exercises that use the body as a weight. If they do use an apparatus, it's likely to be rope for climbing up or jumping over, Russian kettle bells for hoisting around, or medicine balls for throwing against a wall or to a partner. Put these trainers in a junkyard or a cluttered attic, and they'd have no trouble coming up with a challenging workout.

Let's call the modern-school trainers and athletes the integrationists.While some aspects of old-school training should be cast aside, and others need updating, I love training old school, the way Arnold did. I believe devoutly that it still provides benefits that the integrationists can't match with their new-fangled ways. I don't think my body could look the way I want it to look, the way it does look, without heaping helpings of some of these traditional bodybuilding moves. What's more, I think the functional crowd goes overboard in its preoccupation with stability and balance. Stabilization work is important, without question; yet in placing so much emphasis there, they really compromise muscle and strength development. The clients of these trainers never make too many actual gains in strength because all they're doing is stability, stability, stability. Unfortunately, the central nervous system fatigues before the body really has the chance to move enough weight to activate most of a muscle's fibers. It's not the most advantageous way to improve muscle tone, strength, and power.

Having said that, I like the way the isolationists mix and free-weight and machine moves. Free weights force you to recruit more helper muscles for balance and control. Free weights also allow your body to call the shots and stay in charge of the exercise. In contrast, one limitation with certain machines is that the path simply is what it is. For instance, on a machine version of the bench press, the machine will perform the move exactly the same way whether I'm pushing the weight, you're pushing the weight, or a guy who stands six-foot-eight is pushing the weight. Yet if we did a bench press with free weights, your body would send them in one pathway, and mine would send it in another. Now we're both moving the way our bodies were designed to, rather than being locked into a groove.

I love dumbbells, and you'll be picking them up frequently as you work your way through my program. What's great about them is that they require even more helper muscles than barbells. I also think that over time they produce slightly fuller and more complete development than barbells, especially around your all-important joints. You can't necessarily train as heavy with dumbbells as you can with barbells, but for women, especially, I don't believe that super-heavy weights are more beneficial than moderate weights. The important thing is to concentrate on controlling the movement. Leave the gorilla stuff for offensive lineman and moving-and-storage guys.

Also, the pathway of movement is even more natural, and the range of motion greater, with dumbbells than it is with barbells. At the top of either a bench press or a military press, for example, you can bring your arms toward each other, something you can't do with a barbell. Suddenly, you're telling the weights where to go, controlling the actions of each wrist, coordinating how and when to squeeze each chest muscle—all the while making sure to move the weights up and down at the same speed. You basically develop your own style of training with dumbbells. Another advantage: It makes it easier to do the workouts at home if you're so inclined. (By the way, if you find that you have a strong preference for either dumbbells or barbells, trust your instincts. Where you see, say, a "dumbbell squat" listed in the workout program, feel free to perform a barbell squat instead. I won't hold it against you.)

But the attitude that free weights are for serious training, while machines are for sissies, doesn't hold any water with me. Stimulating a muscle means performing the right move with correct form, whether it's with dumbbells, a barbell, machines, cables, or a can of tomato soup, for that matter. There are exceptions, like the aforementioned bench press, but used correctly, some machines do work just as well as free weights. In certain cases, they actually represent the preferred option. If the resistance is sufficient to stimulate growth, and you're taking the load through a full range of motion, it doesn't much matter if you're pushing a free-floating hunk of iron or the mechanical arms of a machine. It's all good.

The bottom line: Mix it up! Depending on what gym I'm training at, I like to use a variety of exercises. Within the same workout, I combine dumbbells, barbells, machines, and cable moves, and that's just for starters. If I'm training chest, I might bounce back and forth between the cable stacks, for crossovers; the pec deck, for machine flyes; and dumbbells, for flyes. It all depends on how I'm feeling that day.

So while I disagree with certain aspects of functional training and believe its advocates dismiss bodybuilding-style training too quickly and casually, the integrationists do champion some training strategies that I like a lot.