Archive for October, 2011

Guest newsletter from Zach Even-Esh

I’ve deadlifted over 500 lbs, squatted 455 for reps, benched over 300 lbs and at 220 lbs can perform 25 pull ups at any time.

Impressive, right? WRONG……

Here’s where it REALLY counts.

My back hurts and I can’t play with my kids without back pain…. and some knee pain thrown in for good measure.

I wake up and walk down the stairs in pain…. hand pain, foot pain, back pain and the pain of feeling like a useless clunk of NOTHING.

I remember having dinner with Dave Tate years ago in Syracuse, NY and he was telling me the first thing he does when he wakes up is go to the jacuzzi. Without the jacuzzi he can’t move his body.

After getting fed up with the endless aches and pains I remember Dave seeking out the help of Alwyn Cosgrove, aka Uncle AC. Uncle AC helped Dave rebuild himself not just for the sake of getting rid of aches and pains, but for the sake of Dave being able to become healthy again, able to play with his kids and operate his business without feeling like he played a Football game day in and day out.

I’m nowhere near as strong (or as cool) as Dave Tate but I feared I felt just as shitty as he was feeling back in the day and I was determined to do something about it.

When you’re no longer living home with Mom and Dad and you actually have to work for a living, support a family and do your own cooking and laundry, feeling sore and unable to walk without pain day in and day out loses it’s “cool factor”.

No matter how much you squat, bench and deadlift, you’re NOT impressing anyone when you’re always in pain and walk around like a car just ran you over every morning.

That USED to be me. Key words, “Used to…”

Strong as all heck…. but as useless as a bike without wheels.

I wanted my health back.

I wanted to play with my kids…. pain free.

I wanted to wake up and go to sleep pain free.

The magazines from the early 1940s were spot on with their training methods. Heck, even the title of the magazine, Strength AND Health made complete and perfect sense.

There is NO strength without your health. Without your health, you have NOTHING.

We’ve ALL been hurt before. Most of the time you’re told to rest and come back when you feel better, “work around the injury” they tell you.

You come back eventually, weaker than before and your injury is still there, the only difference is your injury took a “rest”, a mini vacation so to speak. As soon as you increase your training intensity again, your injury will end his mini vacation and come back to haunt you.

Each injury will lead to a downward spiral, causing poor movement patterns in your body, leading to more injuries. I’ve been there and done that.

You have two choices:

1) Keep living with the pain, ignoring the issues and continue to do damage to your body.

2) Address the injuries, rebuild your weak areas and turn them into strong areas.

After feeling like complete shit, both physically and emotionally, I wanted to rebuild my body and be a better Dad and a better husband.

I also wanted to be a Strength Coach that could walk the talk, not sit behind a computer telling people what to do while I got fat, weak and made excuses for not training.

Nope.

Men should “live the code”.

In essence, as a man, you need to be strong AND healthy. You need to have a blend of strength, conditioning, flexibility and power, also known as athleticism.

You need to balance your body, get away from focusing on your strengths while ignoring injuries and weak areas. Go on and focus on attacking what will make you healthy AND strong in the long run.

Be brutally honest with yourself. Are you as healthy as you can be or are you avoiding doing the necessary work to help you move better and live a better life for yourself and those you love.

It’s time to go back in time…. again…. what’s old is new again. The men of the past were strong, agile, mobile, conditioned and athletic. They had physiques that men of today worship and they were healthy.

Strength AND Health, inside AND out. Live the code.

This is How I Live the Code now, a Far Cry from What I used to do…. Click HERE.

Peace

–Z–

–
AC
PS- you can pick up Zach’s latest product Bodyweight Bodybuilding HERE

Show and Go is on sale for 50% off this week only. Click here for more information!

–
AC

Last week a prospective member of our gym mentioned (when she first walked in) that she was planning to start walking or jogging only, about three times per week until she “raised her metabolism and lost the fat” and then she’d start doing weights to “tone up”, and asked if I thought this was a good idea.

Now I believe that any activity is a great idea – and I encourage people to be as active as possible. But I’ll confess it had been a while since I’d heard this idea of doing aerobics first and then strength training once you’d lost the fat.

So is this a good approach? Let’s take a look …

Hunter et al
Resistance Training Conserves Fat-free Mass and Resting Energy Expenditure Following Weight Loss.
Obesity (Silver Spring). 2008

This study compared three groups:

Diet only, Diet plus aerobic training and aDiet plus resistance training group to determine what effect diet-induced weight loss in combination with exercise training has on body composition and resting energy expenditure.

With similar weight loss – the results showed that only the resistance training group maintained their lean mass and resting energy expenditure (metabolism). The aerobic training and diet only group actually lost muscle and lowered their metabolism. In other words – the strength training group lost more fat and maintained metabolism – meaning that if the program continued for a longer period of time or a greater weight loss, they could continue to lose more fat than the other groups.

And lets’ review a couple of older studies:

Byrne et al
The effects of a 20-week exercise training program on resting metabolic rate in previously sedentary, moderately obese women.
Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab. 2001 Mar

This study compared two groups – Resistance training and aerobic training (walking). The resistance training group increased metabolism while the walking group actually reduced their metabolism)

Bryner et al.Effects of resistance vs. aerobic training combined with an 800 calorie liquid diet on lean body mass and resting metabolic rate.
J Am Coll Nutr. 1999 Apr;18(2):115-21.

The resistance training group lost significantly more fat and did not lose any lean muscle, even at only 800 calories per day. Additionally, the resistance training group actually increased metabolism compared to the aerobic group which decreased metabolism.

—

Kramer, Volek et al.
Influence of exercise training on physiological and performance changes with weight loss in men.
Med. Sci. Sports Exerc., Vol. 31, No. 9, 1999.

Overweight Subjects were assigned to three groups: Diet Only, Diet plus aerobics, Diet plus aerobics plus weights

The Diet-only group lost 14.6 lbs of fat in 12 weeks but when they added in the aerobic program – that group lost only one more pound than the diet group (training was 3 times a week starting at 30 mins and progressing to 3 x 50 minutes over the 12 weeks).

However the Weight Training group lost 21.1lbs of fat (44% and 35% more than diet and aerobic only groups respectively) in the same time frame.

—

It looks like this lady had been fed some inaccurate information. I told her that if her goal is to change the way her body looks – she needs to adjust her diet, and add strength training. Muscle is metabolically active. If you make it work – you burn calories. If you build some more muscle – you burn some more calories.

So if your goal is to increase your metabolism and lose the fat – and you had to choose between strength training or cardio – you need to add strength training to your program FIRST!

–
AC

I wonder what we are doing now, that we’ll look back on in ten or twenty years and wonder what we were thinking….

–
AC

“What is Metabolic Resistance Training”
By Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS, CTT

What the heck are these metabolic resistance training workouts that everyone keeps talking about for fat loss? Well, you’ve probably heard the term because the internet is buzzing about this type of training for fat burning.

After all, gone are the days of slow cardio for weight loss. Heck, even interval training is starting to get passed over. All in favor of this specific type of workout called metabolic resistance training.

It’s really exciting though, to know that we can build muscle and lose fat at the same time, while getting lean and even having ripped six-pack abs thanks to these short, burst workouts. And you don’t need fancy, expensive equipment. Instead, you can focus on using bodyweight exercises, dumbbells, kettlebell exercises, or even TRX exercises.

Anytime you use supersets or circuits and train with an elevated heart rate and insufficient recovery. You are doing metabolic resistance training. But the metabolic resistance training used by Turbulence Training readers is different.

Thanks to a conversation I had with Alwyn Cosgrove, I’ve modified the heavy metabolic resistance training and also incorporated metabolic resistance conditioning using lighter resistance, and less rest.

In this new Turbulence Training metabolic resistance training workout program, you’ll get 4 workouts, broken down into these two components. Two workouts of heavy metabolic resistance training and two workouts of metabolic conditioning. The heavy workouts are done first, and are followed immediately the next day by the conditioning workouts.

I’ll be writing a lot more about metabolic resistance and conditioning workouts in the future to help you lose fat and gain muscle at the same time. That’s the beauty of the system; not only do the fast-paced, short burst workouts help you burn a ton of calories, but if your goal is muscle building, you can do that too.

Until then, get ready to use a few new exercises and a few training methods we haven’t used before to elevate ” in-workout and after-workout” calorie burning.

It’s all about working your metabolic systems for maximum calorie burning, while only permitting yourself to have incomplete recovery. These are the intense workouts you’ve been looking for. No more slow, boring, monotonous cardio workouts that take forever.
Those days are over.

So be prepared to hear a lot more about MRT and metabolic lifting and conditioning workouts. And again, you aren’t limited to machines or weights. You can do these workouts with almost any equipment, and even with bodyweight exercises only, as my bodyweight cardio circuits have proven.

You’ll have a total blast even doing these types of programs at the park with your TRX and kettlebells and bodyweight. You’ll be so much better off than being stuck in stuffy gym with machines. And make sure to watch my video to find out why MRT might even be better than traditional interval training.

Times are a-changing.

The entire fitness industry is going through a revolution where we move away from bodybuilder and cardio bunny workouts. And that’s a good thing. Doing less cardio and eliminating little isolation exercises, such as crunches, from your routines will help you get results fast.

Get started with the Turbulence Training Metabolic Resistance Training workouts here.

You now have a fun, four-day program that will get you ripped and
give you the body that you deserve.

Train hard but safe with new MRT workouts.

Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS

–
AC
PS – you can take Craig’s newest Metabolic Resistance Training workouts for a test drive HERE

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

- Steve Jobs