For all of you avid readers of the Escape Fitness blog you will know that we are now working very closely with Biggest Loser PT and all around fitness legend Richard Callender. We had the absolute privilege of kitting out his gym in Richmond with some of our favourite products and he has been giving us ultra top secret sneak peeks at what’s been going on ‘behind the scenes’ at the Biggest Loser!

Every week Richard sends over a diary entry all about what the Biggest Loser contestants got up to with our equipment, and this week it’s all about dumbbells! If the below isn’t enough for you then why not follow Richard on Twitter? @RichardCallender.

What’s Richard had to say this week?

So it’s Week 2 and after the amazing weight losses last week and the huge record-breaking weight loss from Kevin (Orange team), its back to the drawing board and a back to basics approach to training for me and my training groups. What last week proved was that although the contestants are carrying huge amounts of weight, have below average levels of fitness and have battled demons for many years…they haven’t given up.  It was humbling to see them stand on the scales in front of their peers and viewing public and be judged.  The great news is that no one let themselves down and unfortunately after all the dust had settled, weights collated and eliminations completed, Sam (Brown team) left the Biggest Loser house.  But the big question is…did he learn enough about balanced eating and effective exercise to make a long term difference?  I guess we’ll see at the finale.

So Week 2 in the Biggest Loser is quite often the week in which the weight loss drops and this is for so many reasons.   I feel it is as much psychological as it is physical because after the massive highs of Week 1 where everything is a novelty and exciting, Week 2 is the reality check and can bring you down to earth with bang.

My aim for Week 2 is to build on the functional exercises and movements we used with the ViPR and incorporate those into sessions alongside the use of dumbbells for all around conditioning, strength gain and eventually weight loss.  Educating the contestants is as important as exercising with them.

Dumbbells are one of the first pieces of equipment you have experience with when you start working out and over the decades there have been so many variations on the same theme but few things can still compete with them for sheer versatility. 

The contestants generally do not possess that much muscular strength at this early stage and so my aim this week is to keep constantly changing their workouts to tick the boxes marked strength and endurance to get their muscles working and becoming the calorie powerhouses they need to burn fat.

The workouts were mixed and involved lots of basic movement patterns initially (squats, chest presses, bent over rows, bicep curls, tricep kick-backs, etc) but then progressed through to wood choppers, transverse movements and even plyometric exercises towards the end of the week.   The thing I love about dumbbells is that I had the contestants lifting them, swinging them, pushing them, throwing/catching them, running around them and much more…and every workout pushed them a little more.

Each workout was taxing but always involved elements of interval training to build on their cardiovascular fitness alongside their resistance training.  High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is massively important to me when training contestants/clients for weight loss and almost every facet of fitness because it forces your body to adapt quickly to ever changing and ever increasing levels of stress and therefore a physiological change has to occur quickly. 
Mixing HIIT and dumbbells is a great way to burn through the calories, increase your metabolic rate,  increase your fitness and long term it can burn up to 10% more calories over a 24hour period compared to slow –medium paced cardio.  Dumbbells should be one of your closest friends.

A good week of training, let’s see what the scales say at the end of the infamous Week 2.

Tune in next week for Richard’s next installment, or if you missed last week’s then you can read it here!