Creating light weight destructibles

Greetings all, I have been having an issue with creating destructible meshes for my game. I have used the create destructible mesh to create destructibles, however the files sizes are almost 100 times the size of the original mesh. Is there any way to slim this down, when you have hundreds of meshes game size gets out of hand very quickly with these files sizes. Is the only way to do this to use the Apex tools from NVidia? And if that is the case are there any good beginner tutorials on using said tools?
Many thanks in advance for any assistance anyone could offer.