I received an email from the creator of Turbulense Training and that is a guy named Craig Ballantyne. Craig told a story about how he created Turbulense Training and the techniques the way he made them but the part I was most interested to show you was the way that his Turbulense Training workouts look. Hidden at the bottom of the story was this bit.

I remember the exact day and exact workout that this all came together into the Turbulense Training program. It hit me as I was finishing my intervals. I knew I had found something that was like fat loss magic.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to put it in a pill. But I’ve
been able to put it down on paper in all of the Turbulense Training manuals.

The exact workout I used that day went like this…

Warm-up
1 set of Bodyweight Squats
1 set of pushups
1 set of Squats with the empty bar
1 set of light dumbbell chest presses
1 set of moderate weight barbell squats
1 set of moderate weight dumbbell chest presses

Strength Training Superset #1
Barbell Squats paired with Dumbbell Chest Presses
3 supersets, aiming for 8 reps per side per set

Strength Training Superset #2
DB Rows paired with Barbell Forward Lunges
3 supersets, aiming for 8 reps per set

Stationary Bike Intervals
After a warmup, I did 6 intervals of 45 seconds work and 45 seconds rest, finishing with a cool-down.

And from that point in time, I’ve tried to share this and all the
other Turbulense Training workouts with as many men and women as possible. The same men and women that I would see day-in and day-out performing the same ineffective slow-cardio fat loss programs, and not making a darn change month after month. And every day they would see me, soaked in sweat, feeling great and looking lean, and finishing another Turbulense Training workout.

As you can see most of this workout is based on tiring and quick workouts. A bit of the way that circuit training works. This is a great way to workout and as I have mentioned before Craig’s program is all the rage at the Mens Health and Mens Fitness magazines. To find out more about Turbulense training just go check out his site

Thanks for visiting. To get started why not subscribe to the 21 day fitness plan at the top of this page. Look in the red box, it is right there.. Thanks Bill

I wanted to post this question and answer from the guy that created the Turbulence Training program because I know how many people just run through their cardio without doing it the right way. It is not a pleasant jog or a sprint you are looking for but instead something in between that you should strive for. Read on….

Question
I’ve been told to exercise in my “fat burning zone”. What’s the best cardio method for weight loss.

Answer:
Cardio is not the only solution.

Clearly it adds to the energy deficit and overall calorie balance that favors fat loss.

BUT it’s not the “be all & end all” of fat loss success - and that is anecdotally supported by the number of overweight distance runners.

I almost never recommend long, slow cardio…simply because no one I train or consult with has the time for this, and it doesn’t work any better than shorter, less frequent, more intense interval training sessions.

Five or six days of 45-minute cardio sessions in my fat-burning zone? Yeah right, like anyone has time for that.

If I told you that you could get the same results (or better, as recent research suggests) in three 20-minute interval sessions each week as you could from three or five 45-minute slower cardio sessions each week, which would you choose?

Yes, intervals feel about 10x’s harder than regular, slow, boring cardio. And yes, you won’t be able to read your people magazine when doing intervals. And you might breath a little heavy. So if you’re worried about sweating, than maybe fat loss isn’t for you.

But if you don’t mind going against the crowd, intervals are worth every second for the superior results.

Now here’s one reason why Turbulence Training may actually work better for women than men…

More women tend to start Turbulence Training after having spent months or years using slow cardio and light (if any) weights. And selfishly, I could not be any happier - because when these dedicated women start using the shorter, more intense strength and interval sessions they make rapid progress and make me look like a genius.

The accolades come pouring in…I have dozens of testimonials from women thanking me for saving them TIME while helping them finally breakthrough stubborn fat loss plateaus (and eliminating the pain from their overuse injuries that occurred due to high volumes of cardio). Their words make me feel like a million bucks because the Turbulence Training workouts are making these women feel like a million bucks.

Your knees are the pivot point for any kind of exercise be it running, biking or just about any team sport as well. Being critical to exercise it is important to keep your knees strong. There are a few things that you can do to protect your knees and care for them so that you can avoid the debilitating knee surgeries that so many people in even their 30s and 40s need to get.

You knees are made up of cartilage at the join on both the top and bottom bones and ligaments and tendons around the sides and through the middle. Over time it is the cartlage that wears and sometimes chips off, I can tell this myself as sometimes I will get a bit of a locking in my knees for a few hours until the bits of cartilage floating around become unstuck in the joint.

First of all there is a difference between protecting your knees and having an injury that involves the knee. As you no doubt have noticed your knees only going in one direction and either hyerextending (stretching to far) or having your knee go sideways can create an injury that will take anywhere from a few days to a few months to heal. If you do have a basic injury to your knee it is incredibly important to let it heal for as long as it takes. An injury that does not heal fully will be very susceptible to re injury afterwards as we have seen in many pro athletes.

If you injure you knee it will swell up very quickly as there is quite a bit of blood flow in your lower body so besides the obvious of going to the doctor to have you knee tested you also want to take down the swelling. Ice you knee for a half hour once an hour so 30 minutes on and 30 minutes off for the first day. On the second day and after alternate heat and ice for 20 minutes each as often as you can. The ice will keep the swelling down and the heat will help you speed up the healing. In this early healing time even though you may have a bit of strength in your knee always wrap your knee and be very careful not to push it at all you definitely do not want your knee to get hurt again this soon after.

I had a lot of problems with my knees over the years especially my left knee because I always did come back too quickly from injury. Now my knees seem to be pretty good because my main lower body exercise is low impact. I bike as much as I can and this has strengthened all of the muscles around my knee so that I am now quite strong. One problem that still persists though is running, I can not seem to do any consistent running for more than a few weeks without my knees hurting and having to give it up.

Another thing that will help your knees is to not lock out your knee during weight workouts. When doing squats or leg presses it is important to not lock out your knees as this is another way that you can cause harm to your knee cartilage.

Soccer has always been known as a great alternative to jogging as a great form of exercise but a new study seems to show that Soccer is actually much better as a form of exercise than jogging.

University of Copenhagen sports scientist Peter Krustrup and his colleagues conducted their research on 37 men. The researchers strapped heart monitors to their chests and compared blood samples and muscle tissue before and after matches and jogging sessions. The men were split into groups of soccer players, joggers, and couch potatoes.

After 12 weeks, researchers found that the body fat percentage in the soccer players dropped by 3.7 percent, compared to about 2 percent for the joggers. The soccer players also increased their muscle mass by almost 4.5 pounds, whereas the joggers didn’t have any significant change

So why these results? Well I think that the excitement that people feel when playing a team sport helps but more importnantly to play soccer means to jog around some and sprint some and the faster-slower type exercise confuses you muscles and helps you get in a much better workout.

Do you agree? Now that winter is coming it would be a great time to look into one of those fun indoor soccer leagues.

I just noticed yesterday that the tour De France has started up again for the year. I am a biker but I only ride as far as to work everyday, I have never ridden my bike a hundred miles before. Every year I watch the tour and I do not watch it just for the drama and entertainment value I watch it partially just to see that there is no real limits except for the ones that we create for ourselves.

This year the Tour de France will cover 2200 miles in 20 days. For someone that has never ridden a 100 miles in a day, also known as a century ride, this kind of race still astounds me. Not only are many of the stages of the Tour De France over 100 miles long but there are a series of stages that go through the mountains were the climb may be tough but also the lack of oxygen at higher elevations makes these race stages even more difficult.

There is another shadow race that occurs the day after each Tour de France stage and this is where people get together and race the same stage that the pros did the day before.

So next time you are on the couch and thinking about how you can get just a little more exercise in your day to lose weight just remember that over the next three weeks over 150 of the best riders in the world are racing as fast as cars to try to be the first to get through Paris.

Later this week I will post a sample training schedule that the Tour de France racers use.

I wrote a post last week about buying used exercise equipment because at this time of year it is much easier to by exercise equipment then it is at any other time of the year and to save money to boot. Anyway in all of the equipment that I mentioned I never did mention the best piece of cardio exercise equipment and that is the rowing machine.

Rowing machines are a bit more complex and a bit harder to use than the standard stair machine, exercise bike, or treadmill. A rowing machine is a much better piece of equipment if you are looking for a new piece of equipment because it does a lot more for your body. With a bike you work your legs mostly and your abs a little and with a treadmill it is only a leg workout for the most part but with a rowing machine you work a lot more body parts.

Rowing machines work nearly all of the major muscle groups with work done by your quads, hamstrings, back, biceps and abs. There is no better exercise for the entire body than a rowing machine besides maybe swimming.

Lastly, most rowing machines take almost no space. A good quality rowing machine is very flat and can fit under a bed or up against a wall and for this reason alone it is much easier to contain a rowing machine in an apartment or small house then it is to have a treadmill or exercise bike.

One of the nice things about working out in the summer is that you can workout outside instead of inside and it always seems like you have a lot more energy then you did in the wintertime.

One thing to be really aware of if you are biking outside is that you can in fact coast. By coasting I mean that without pedaling you will still be moving where as on your indoor bike you would never stop pedaling because you know full well that you are not riding.

So next time that you are on your bike outside try to be conscious of the times that you are just coasting and not really pedaling. Better yet try doing different exercises. when you are running or swimming you will not be able to coast. You will know that you are in fact moving or stop. It is always easiest to just use one method of exercise but it is important to make sure that you are getting all of your muscles working which really does take doing more than one kind of exercise.

This is a great time of year to start looking at used fitness equipment. Most people are outside exercising and have already forgotten about that exercise equipment that they bought last Christmas and used once or twice and are now thinking of selling it.

I remember years ago my wife and I forked out a fair amount of money for a new exercise bike and Stair machine and then once every couple of years we have traded one of them in for a used piece of fitness equipment as e get bored of what we have. Right now we have one good elliptical trainer and one good exercise bike sitting it our bedroom and they do both get used, mostly in the winter more than anything though.

If you are looking for an exercise bike, elliptical trainer or stair machine for the winter you can go out now to used stores, your local buy and sell or bargain finder and even garage sales. There will be a it of a motivation right now as people want to get rid of that equipment forgetting that winter will come again but at the same time feeling guilty about not using that nice new stuff that they did buy.

Here are some tips when looking at used fitness equipment.

1. Try it out first. There is nothing worse than having a clunky piece of good looking equipment, you want to make sure that it feels nice and smooth. Have a bit of a conversation with the seller for five minutes while you try all the settings and the different intensity levels

2. Buy a good name brand. When it comes to fitness equipment a good piece of equipment will last for many years while a cheap piece of fitness equipment will last only one winter.

3. Check all of the bolts and lever points. Make sure that the bike or elliptical trainer is not worn and really is in good shape.

4. Do a lot of comparison shopping. The market is slow now so you can expect that piece of fitness equipment to be around for a couple of weeks before it is sold.

I know that you probably would rather wait until fall to buy your fitness equipment but right now is a good time to buy as everyone will be competing with you in September or October for all of the equipment that people are not quite so motivated to sell.

Found this great bit of info from mercola.com. Apparently the best way to really pick up a cardio workout is to have short high intensity peaks in your workout to really push yourself.

New findings suggest that it pays to alternate short bursts of high-intensity exercise with gentle recovery during workout regimens at least once a week.

Although this alternating technique, called interval training, has existed for decades, a new study has confirmed that it can dramatically improve cardiovascular fitness and the body’s fat-burning capabilities.

Researchers asked eight college-age men and women to sprint for 30 seconds, and then either stop or pedal gently for four minutes. After only two weeks of this interval training, 75 percent of them doubled their endurance.

A control group, which did not do any interval training, showed no improvement in endurance. The marked improvement in the interval training group was even more startling because the volunteers were already fairly fit.

Another study also showed that interval training enhances the body’s ability to burn fat. Eight women in their early 20s were told to cycle for 10 sets of four minutes of hard riding, followed by two minutes of rest. After two weeks, the amount of fat burned in an hour of continuous moderate cycling increased by 36 percent, and their cardiovascular fitness improved by 13 percent.

I found a couple of posts around the internet that spoke of a study at McMaster University that showed that hard exercise for a shorter period of time is better than a long workout at a lower level of intensity. I found the article at the Journal of Physiology but you really need to be a scientist to decipher what they have to say. Well the LA Times a bastion of healthy California attitude has a good spin on this research finding that I wanted to share

When it comes to cardio exercise, less appears to be more.

That’s the conclusion of researchers who discovered that extremely short bouts of high-intensity exercise produce the same improvements in muscle health as longer, more moderately paced workout sessions.

In the two-week study, published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Physiology, 16 college-age men, all recreational exercisers, were asked to exercise on stationary bicycles three times a week. One group cycled for 30 seconds all-out, followed by four minutes of recovery, or pedaling at a slower speed while keeping the heart rate somewhat elevated. They repeated that several times for a total of about 20 minutes a day. The other group cycled at a moderate pace for 90 to 120 minutes a day.

At the end of the study, the men’s muscles were tested for an enzyme that’s “an indicator of the muscle’s ability to use oxygen,” says lead author Martin Gibala, associate professor of kinesiology at Canada’s McMaster University. In both groups, the enzyme level increased by about 25% to 30%. He adds, “You can think about that as being able to produce energy more efficiently, being able to go at a faster pace and exercise longer.”
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