Posts Tagged ‘interval training’
“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
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AC
PS – you can take Craig’s newest Metabolic Resistance Training workouts for a test drive HERE
Tags: (I talked about kettlebell training for cardio previously – part one here and part two here).
I just recently read the results of a new study using kettlebell training:
Scand J Work Environ Health. 2011 May;37(3):196-203.
Kettlebell training for musculoskeletal and cardiovascular health: a randomized controlled trial.
Jay K et al.
This study split 40 participants with a high prevalence of reported musculoskeletal pain symptoms, into two groups- a kettlebell training group and a control group (no exercise).
The exercise group consisted of “ballistic full-body kettlebell exercise 3 times per week for 8 weeks” The main outcome measures were pain intensity of the neck/shoulders and low back, isometric muscle strength, and aerobic fitness.
After 8 weeks the exercise group had reduced pain levels significantly in the neck/shoulders and low back and increased muscle strength of the trunk extensors but not the trunk flexors or shoulders. Aerobic fitness did not improve at all in the exercise group.
The pain results are great as we’d normally have shied away from high speed ballistic training in a clientele reporting pain – but why was there no improvement in trunk flexor strength ? Quite simply – they didn’t train trunk flexion at all. They only trained trunk extension…
From the study:
Each session lasting 20 minutes included a 5–10 minute warm up and a 10–15 minute interval training.
The interval training consisted of 10 intervals of 30 seconds with rest period of 30–60 seconds. The intervals consisted of constant work with participants choosing an appropri-ate progression level as follows: (i) unweighted swing; (ii) deadlift with a kettlebell; (iii) two-handed swing with a kettlebell; and (iv) one- handed swing with a kettlebell.
During the first 4 weeks of training, the rest between sets was one minute of active recovery. During the last 4 weeks, the rest was compressed to 30 seconds of active recovery
They only did deadlift or swing-type movements. That’s training specificity 101 – the SAID principle – specific adaptation to imposed demands – you improve what you train. If you want to improve the whole body, you need to train every movement.
What about the lack of aerobic fitness improvement? (as that contradicts earlier studies).
Same thing basically — it was 4 weeks of 1:2 work:rest using low loads, and then 4 weeks of 1:1 (using higher loading or more advanced exercises). So the lack of aerobic improvement may just mean that the routine wasn’t cardiovascularly demanding enough.
The researchers noted: “We attribute the lack of change in aerobic fitness to insufficient cardiovascular stimulation in the brief training sessions. The session duration of 20 minutes (consisting of 5–10 minutes of warm-up followed by 10–15 minutes of kettlebell training) does not leave ample duration to stimulate significant cardiovascular adaptations.”
Overall it’s a pretty cool finding though. This was one of the first studies to look at power training or ballistic movements and their effect on reducing pain. The researchers mentioned “Our study is the first to demonstrate that ballistic cyclic training with high peak forces markedly lowers pain symptoms in both the neck/shoulder and low-back region.”
My take home advice:
An earlier study showed that explosive training burns 13% more calories during training than slow controlled reps, and 7% more calories post training. The kettlebell studies I posted earlier in this blog show how this type of training can create metabolic demand, the following study-
J Strength Cond Res. 2010 Dec;24(12):3369-80.
A comparison of high-speed power training and traditional slow-speed resistance training in older men and women.
Sayers et al.
- recommends that training programs for older adults emphasize high-speed movements at low external resistances, I think it’s safe to say that training programs both for yourself, and for your clients need to include some form of ballistic or explosive training.
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In honor of the UEFA Champions League quarter-finals I’m reposting this:
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Check out this study that Craig Ballantyne forwarded to me:
Recreational soccer is an effective health-promoting activity for untrained men
Krustrup et al.
British Journal of Sports Medicine 2009;43:825-831
36 healthy untrained men were randomized into a soccer group, a running group and a control group.
Training was performed for 1 hour two or three times per week for 12 weeks; at an average heart rate of 82% of HRmax for both training groups (so it was fairly intense)
During the 12 week program, the soccer group improved maximal oxygen uptake (a measure of aerobic fitness) 62% more than the running group. The soccer group also lost an average of 50% more fat than the running group (6lbs vs 4lbs)
The soccer group had an increase in lean body mass of 3.75lbs, an increase in lower
extremity bone mass, a greater decrease in LDL-cholesterol and an increase in fat oxidation
during running at 9.5 km/h. The running group saw none of these changes.
The number of capillaries per muscle fiber was also almost 50% higher in the soccer training group than in running. Both groups reduced blood pressure equally.
The researchers concluded that participation in recreational soccer training, has significant beneficial effects on health profile and physical capacity and in some aspects it is superior
to frequent moderate-intensity running.
What does this tell us?
Well, think about soccer. The difference is more than adding a ball while running (as most of the time you don’t have the ball)
Soccer is essentially a form of interval training (although the work and recovery periods are randomized – CHAOS training as my friend Robert Dos Remedios calls it).
It’s also multi-directional, multi-movement (jumping, heading, running, sprinting, kicking, tackling, with contact) and multi-planar. It’s random, opposed interval training.
Basically this study shows that open interval training, using multiple movements and directions is superior for conditioning, muscle building and fat loss when compared to the same intensity of running.
I just wish they’d discovered that watching soccer was just as good…..
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AC
PS – I hate calling the game “soccer”…. it’s FOOT-ball. Played with your feet….
This was previously published Mar 2010
I’ve been getting some emails/facebook messages about different workouts so I thought I’d post today’s training session here on the blog.
(BTW – make sure you join my facebook page HERE)
Today’s workout was a combination of the TRX and a couple of kettlebells. The weather was beautiful so I trained in the backyard this morning.
Here’s what I did today (for videos of the exercises- click HERE): Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a very simple metabolic workout that I did earlier this week.
I used a gymboss timer to track my work intervals – but you could do it with a regular stopwatch, or even just looking at the second hand on a clock.
This looks simple – but I tracked heart rate and found it to be a great interval training session!
All i did was the following:
1) Start the gymboss timer and set it for one minute repeats (so it ‘beeps’ every minute)
2) Do 10-12 kettlebell swings or similar (takes about 2s per swing on average)
3) Rest for the remainder of the minute
4) Repeat at the start of the next minute (when the timer beeps)
5) Go for 30 mins or however long you want the interval session to be.
This was an effective 30 min interval training session, using a 20-25s on, 35-40s off work:rest interval.
I changed up the swings – going from two hand swings, to one handed swings (5 each side), to hand-to-hand swings. I also added a round or two of kettlebell snatches, and a round or two of kettlebell clean and jerks (I only did 3 each side of these to keep the work interval the same).
Give it a try, next time you want a short and effective interval workout.
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Alwyn
Excerpted from Mens Health
By Adam Campbell
The Great Aerobic Hoax
For decades, we’ve been told that the best activity for burning calories and fat is aerobic exercise. In fact, you can practically pinpoint the year this idea started to take hold: 1977. That’s when Jim Fixx’s The Complete Book of Running was published. This bestseller popularized the notion of running to improve health and lose weight, and it’s widely credited with kicking off the jogging boom of the 1980s. Hundreds of studies since then have reported that aerobic exercise offers many benefits, from improving markers of heart-disease risk to coping with mental stress to enhancing cognitive function. That’s all good. But if you’re looking to shed fat, the newest weight-loss research will tell you to look elsewhere for your exercise routine. “It’s sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says Jeff Volek, Ph.D., R.D., an exercise and nutrition scientist at the University of Connecticut. “Any type of exercise burns calories. So if you’re told that running is ideal and you start dropping pounds once you take it up, then you have no reason to believe otherwise.”
But Volek’s research gives him good reason to doubt the conventional wisdom about the superiority of aerobic exercise for fat loss. In one study, Volek and his team put overweight people on a reduced-calorie diet and divided them into three groups. One group didn’t exercise, another performed aerobic exercise 3 days a week, and a third did both aerobic exercise and weight training 3 days a week.
The results: Each group lost nearly the same amount of weight—about 21 pounds per person in 12 weeks. But the lifters shed 5 more pounds of fat than those who didn’t pump iron. The weight they lost was almost pure fat, while the other two groups shed 15 pounds of lard, but also gave up 5-plus pounds of muscle. “Think about that,” says Volek. “For the same amount of exercise time, with diets being equal, the participants who lifted lost almost 40 percent more fat.”
This isn’t a one-time finding, either. Research on low-calorie dieters who don’t lift shows that, on average, 75 percent of their weight loss is from fat and 25 percent of it is muscle. That 25 percent may reduce your scale weight, but it doesn’t do a lot for your reflection in the mirror. (Can you say “skinny-fat”?) However, if you weight-train as you diet, you protect your hard-earned muscle and burn extra fat instead.
Picture it in terms of liposuction: The whole point is simply to remove unattractive flab, right? That’s exactly what you should demand from your workouts.
The New Science of Calorie Burning
There’s one argument for aerobic exercise that’s always been rock solid. It’s well documented that an activity like moderate jogging burns more calories than weight training, an activity that’s highly anaerobic. In fact, if you go by the numbers you find that even golfing beats out a light circuit workout. But recent research shows a new perspective.
When Christopher Scott, PhD., an exercise physiologist at the University of Southern Maine, began using an advanced method to estimate energy expenditure during exercise, his data indicated that weight training burns more calories than originally thought—up to 71 percent more. Based on these findings, it’s estimated that performing just one circuit of eight exercises—which takes about 8 minutes— can expend 159 to 231 calories. That’s about the same as running at a 6-minute-mile pace for the same duration.
“Exercise physiologists often use the techniques for estimating the energy expenditure of walking and jogging and apply them to weightlifting,” says Scott. “But clearly, aerobic and anaerobic activities differ, and so too should the way we estimate their energy expenditures.” Scott’s revelation is most certainly a relief to gym rats everywhere, who no doubt wondered why an intense, energy- sapping weight workout supposedly burned so few calories.
Real-world Results
The unfortunate reality is that science is slow. “If we waited around for studies to tell us what works best for fat loss, we’d go out of business,” says Rachel Cosgrove, C.S.C.S., who co- owns Results Fitness in Santa Clarita, California, with her husband, Alwyn. Over the past 10 years, the Cosgroves have risen to the top of the fitness industry because of their clients’ successes. From the beginning, their programs were scientifically based. “Starting out, we knew that weight training was necessary to avoid muscle loss, and that it appears to boost your metabolism for hours after you work out,” Cosgrove says. “We also knew that according to studies, higher-intensity exercises such as interval training and weight training resulted in greater fat loss than lower-intensity exercise did.”
But from there, the Cosgroves started their own experiments. “As time went by, we began to drop aerobic exercise from our fat-loss programs altogether. And guess what? Our clients achieved even faster results,” says Cosgrove. Keep in mind that the Cosgroves’ clients aren’t like Biggest Loser contestants. In other words, they don’t have 4 to 6 hours a day to work out. “Our average client has to be in and out of the gym in 45 to 60 minutes and has only 2 to 4 days a week to exercise,” she says. “We design workouts to optimize that time.” That’s why the Cosgroves rely on what they call “metabolic circuits.” These are fast-paced weight-training routines in which you alternate between upper- and lower-body exercises. You might compare this type of activity to running repeated bouts of 30- to 60-second sprints. While sprinting has been shown to burn calories at a high rate, it can’t be sustained for long because the muscles in your lower body become fatigued—and that’s even if you’re resting between sprints. “But with metabolic circuits, you’re emphasizing different muscles in each exercise,” says Cosgrove. “So you can maintain a high- intensity effort for a much longer duration, and with almost no rest.” The result: the muscle-saving, calorie-burning benefits of intense resistance training and sprints, combined with the nonstop movement of long, steady-state aerobic exercise.
It could be the greatest fat-loss workout known to man.
Of course, if you try to find evidence of this workout’s effectiveness in the scientific journals, you’ll be disappointed: No one has studied it yet. But researchers like Volek and Scott are beginning to put the pieces together. Just as important, trainers like the Cosgroves are already using this kind of routine to help their real-world clients achieve faster results than ever.
(A full version of this article was previously published in Mens Health magazine and at MensHealth.com)
