10 best free weight exercises for building muscle and losing fat Butkus style

Butkus doing Shrugs with 405 lbs!

How do know what exercises to use for the best results from your workout?  Me personally, call me lazy but I want to use the least amount of exercises that will get me the best results in the fastest amount of time.  I'm very impatient and have tried every type of workouts and when it comes down to it, there are exercises that are far more productive than others.  Granted more productive almost always means harder and more painful but the trade off is you'll get more results in less time.

50 years ago Arthur Jones the founder of Nautilus and long time friend of Dick Butkus once said, "If you like an exercise, chances are your probably not doing it right" and there's nothing more true today.  In fact most of the things AJ said about training were so far ahead of there time but that's a whole other discussion. Now, what exercises are the best for getting fast results with building muscle and losing body fat? Think about the top 5 or 6 exercises that you absolutely hate, the ones most people are not good at, the ones that you never see anyone doing in the gym, and those would be the exact exercises you should be doing! They are the barbell squats, barbell rows, bench presses (incline or flat), pullovers, stiff-legged dead lifts, pull-ups, bar dips, straight barbell curls, standing overhead barbell presses.  A typical workout for maximum muscle building and losing fat could be arrange as follows:

Monday-Wednesday-Friday

1. Squats - 1 set of 20
2. Pullovers - 1 set of 20
3. Squats - 1 set of 15 
4. Pullovers - 1 set of 15
5. Bench Presses - 1 set of 10 reps
6. Barbell rows - 1 set of 15
7. Bench Presses - 1 set of 8 reps 
8. Parallel grip Pull ups - As Many as you can
9. Standing Overhead Press - 1 set of 10
10. Reverse grip pull ups - As many as you can
11. Standing Overhead Press - 1 set of 8
12. Stiff legged Dead lifts - 1 set of 15 reps
13. Barbell Curls - 1 set of 10
14. Parallel Dips - As many as you can
15. Barbell Curls - 1 set of 8
16. Parallel Dips - As many as you can
17. Wrist curls - 1 set of 20
18. Reverse wrist curls - 1 set of 20

Your body doesn't have any idea what the number on the side of the weight says, pick a weight that makes the goal reps extremely hard but never stop just because your reached your rep goal.  If you do more or less reps than the goal, just take note and make adjustments for your next workout.  Do each rep very slowly with no cheating, starting each rep smoothly and focusing on the area being worked.  It should take you about 2-3 seconds to lift the weight and 2-3 seconds to lower the weight. Each exercise is done to failure except for the squats and dead lifts.

To get the best cardiovascular conditioning during the workout, take only enough time between exercises to catch your breath and then move to the next exercise.  Periodically substitute exercises such as shrugs, incline chest presses, shoulder raises, and tricep extensions and you have program that can serve you well for years of great results.  A training program such as this may look basic but it's probably one of the most productive workouts for building muscle and cardiovascular conditioning anyone could do.