Welcome to the Get Fit Guys' quick and dirty tips to get moving and shape up.

My name is Brock Armstrong and I'm the Get Fit Guy.

A few years ago, a friend of mine actually took me up on a challenge and raced a Spartan

obstacle race while wearing a weighted vest.

It's not an exaggeration to say that doing so made an already intense race a million

times harder.

Well, okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but you get my point.

After the race, he said that he literally felt like he was dragging an entire extra body around the race course.

And after looking at the data from his wrist-worn activity tracker during a debriefing later that

day, we could see that his heart rate shot up, his lungs and muscles must have been burning,

and his body temperature went through the roof.

Now, the next day, he was so sore and so fatigued that his walking gate actually reminded me

of a zombie in one of those old horror films. So while I certainly don't think you need to do

an obstacle race in a weighted vest, this piece of fitness gear can come in quite

handy as a potent tool for enhancing the difficulty of an aerobic workout, or building extra

strength and muscle, and turning up the intensity of body weight exercise. So some of you may actually

be wondering what a weighted vest really is. Well, a weighted vest is simply a vest that is either made

from a heavy material or equipped with small pockets that can be filled with tiny sandbags,

custom-sized steel bars, or a variety of other weighted objects. The general purpose of a weighted

vest is to add extra weight for body weight exercises for walking, for distance

running, or speed agility and quickness drills. And when it comes to performance, research has

shown that using this type of extra load during sprinting or speedwork requires your lower body

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