15 Minutes to Fit: The Simple 30-Day Guide to Total Fitness, 15 Minutes At A Time - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Zuzka Light is the leading fitness personality on YouTube, fostering a following of hundreds of millions worldwide. Light cofounded BodyRockTV before starting Zuzkalight.com, which allowed her to build a huge fan base in the United States and overseas. Her personality, style, and voice have guided her to become one of the biggest influencers in health and fitness.

Jeff O’Connell is the editor in chief of BodyBuilding.com, which is the largest online health-and-fitness publication, has the world’s largest social network, and receives 30 million unique visitors monthly. O’Connell was formerly editor in chief at Muscle & Fitness and executive writer at Men’s Health. He has coauthored five books, including the New York Times–bestselling LL Cool J’s Platinum Workout, Formula 50 with 50 Cent, and Spartan Up! with Joe De Sena. His first solo work, Sugar Nation, was published in 2011.

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Preface

Despite the balmy Mediterranean weather, sweat poured off my body—that’s how hard I was training. Heaving with exhaustion, I tackled the final set of burpees. Don’t let the cute name fool you: Burpees are a tough, wildly effective way to blast fat and build lean muscle.

The locals on Malta seemed perplexed by the sight of an eastern European woman in a sports bra with a firm stomach hopping up and down as though the rooftop—where we were filming this workout—were on fire, but I was doing exactly that. I’m sure these witnesses thought I was crazy.

From a standing position, I dropped into a squat and placed my palms on the ground. Without hesitating I kicked my legs back and assumed the top of a push-up position. I performed the push-up, and then, without hesitation, I drew my legs back into the low squat stance, glutes near the ground, before driving my body upward. I dropped into another rep and then another and another. I had no weights, no equipment, no gym, but I was cranking out reps of the most effective exercise that I think you can perform: Burpees work more than 200 muscles during each rep while leaving you gasping for additional oxygen after a set. This may exhaust you, but it helps you grow, and it also helps you feel alive.

My husband at that time, Freddy, recorded the entirety of this workout in Malta. We spent much of our tentative marriage traveling to far-flung locations and filming my daily workouts, posting them on YouTube and our website. The first of these workouts was filmed in Prague, where I was born and raised. Then we moved to Canada, where he was raised. But that day’s workout took place in Malta, where the low cost of living and balmy California-like weather helped us film outdoors. I could take off my sweats and train in my sports bra and shorts, showcasing my abs without freezing off my glutes. At that time, I was in my early twenties, and I didn’t understand how these short workout videos we made would change my life for the better over the following years.

In early 2008, Freddy and I launched our fledgling business BodyRock.tv. We started small—when we launched the first website, I was working in a flower shop owned by my in-laws in Kingston, Ontario, Canada—but still, I was sure that people would like it. I knew it would take a while before the website started to make money, at least a year, but I knew it was going to work. BodyRock.tv started slowly, but then our YouTube channel started growing like crazy. With our short, intense, no-gym-required workouts, Freddy and I were on to a new workout style that people embraced in droves. It took only six months for us to reach one million views.

I based my workouts on moves I could perform anywhere because we couldn’t afford gym memberships. Almost all of the workouts I found online were either bodybuilding style and directed toward men, or yoga-oriented for women. Neither of these suited my goals of burning body fat and adding lean muscle, so I invented my own training style, taking a few elements from an upstart movement called CrossFit, others from Tabata training, and adding my own unique twist to every influence I liked and thought would be effective.

Sure, some of my YouTube viewers were guys tuning in because they liked to watch a woman work out. But women constituted 90 percent of my audience. Despite our remote locations and low-tech approach to making fitness videos, my workout videos became a global fitness sensation. Millions of BodyRockers were doing my workouts every day and posting their fat-loss stories online. So I kept it up; I posted a video of my workouts each day and poured my heart, soul, and sweat out on-camera, making each workout more intense than every other at-home workout program. My fans loved the outdoor setting of the videos we shot in Malta, where we moved to from Canada. Malta helped us in other, unexpected ways. Uploading a video to the Web took six hours on this remote island. The longer the video, the longer it took us to upload it. To save uploading time, my workouts became shorter and more intense, until I distilled them to 15 minutes of fat-burning moves done in nonstop fashion. Rest came only after the workout ended.

I think part of my appeal was that I didn’t bark orders or emphasize counts as some fitness personalities do. I didn’t tell people what to do. I merely performed my workouts from start to finish, grunting and sweating along with viewers who were in it with me every rep of the way. There was a realness to these YouTube workouts that many at-home fitness programs don’t provide.

Canada and Malta seemed worlds apart, but no matter where we traveled, no matter how successful we became, I was always dogged by elements of my past and the threat of scandal. As a young woman living in Prague, I needed to make enough money to free myself from a troubled home life, which led me to make a regrettable decision: I posed nude for photos and video shoots. Like many young, vulnerable women, I found that this decision, once made, was nearly impossible to undo. In the Internet age, the consequences took on a life of their own. I worried that this would sabotage my newfound success once my followers learned about my past.

But something unexpected happened. When the full story of my earlier decisions began to trickle out in the comments sections of video postings, online forums, and other places, my popularity rose even faster. People now knew how much I had overcome. As my followers began to understand who I was and what I’d left behind, they seemed to appreciate me that much more. Most of them hadn’t made the same mistakes I had made, but many of them had made their own mistakes. They identified with the struggles of a young woman trying to find success in our complicated world.

Huge social media followings and YouTube channels like mine drew the attention of large fitness companies. I found myself in Los Angeles meeting with Beachbody, Body by Jake, and other mainstream fitness brands because they had seen my YouTube workouts, and they were responding well to them. Something big was at hand.

My business and marriage were completely intertwined, however, and over the course of several years, that lack of separation doomed the marriage and drove a wedge between my husband and me. As our marriage dissolved, we became disgruntled and awkward business partners; and in the fallout, eventually I lost access to the website. The only thing I walked away with was my image. Rather than wallow in despair, I picked myself up and started over by launching a new website, ZuzkaLight.com. Today, I have surpassed my earlier success thanks to my current followers. Regardless of how you found me, I know that you’re a woman or man taking control of your life by getting in better shape.

All my longtime followers know that I have helped them do this, and that’s what I want to do for you. That’s why I’ve written this book.

Introduction

I’ve often asked myself: Why me? With so many people posting so many workout videos online, why did so many viewers gravitate toward a young girl from the Czech Republic with an accent and no gym equipment? I’ve considered a number of theories, but I think so many people came to my YouTube videos for the workouts because they’re highly effective. This book puts together a program based on these workouts in a novel way. These workouts do more than just burn fat and build muscle; they help unleash the super-fit person who lives inside each and every one of us. My followers learn they are able to perform harder workouts than they ever thought possible. This not only inspires confidence but teaches your muscles and body to learn what it’s like to perform and train at...