Tuesday, October 26, 2010

3 Radical Weight Loss Tips

If you are struggling with your weight loss program, doing all of the conventional things like cardio and low-carbohydrate dieting, then this is the most important article you'll read all year. There are better ways to lose weight than restricting your fruit intake or spending hours on the cardio machine. In fact, you can achieve fast weight loss by exercising less and worrying less about your weight loss diet. Here are 3 radical tips for weight loss.

The first radical change to your weight loss plan is to stop dieting and start using, "Intermittent Fasting". Sounds crazy, right? Well, it isn't. It certainly is radical though, but that's what I've promised you. Diet expert Brad Pilon recommends using fasting to help with your weight loss program, and to overcome what is known as Obsessive-Compulsive eating habits, such as worrying if you don't eat every three hours, or obsessing over meeting the 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight rule set out by bodybuilders.

If you are sick of forcing six meals per day down your throat, or if your lifestyle has absolutely no way in heck of allowing you to eat that frequently, then you'll love using fasting for weight loss. It helps you create the essential calorie deficit by fasting one day per week, while drinking calorie free liquids of course, and then you simply eat normally, but not excessively on the other days of the week. No more worrying about hardcore dieting. No more obsessing about calories or protein or carbohydrate. Plus, you'll free up a lot of time and mental energy on your fasting day, so that you get more work done and spend less time in the kitchen.

Fasting is truly a liberating experience, and a radical change from what most people are used to. I know it sounds odd, but remember, religions have included fasting in their worship practices for centuries. Almost anyone can do fasting if they have the proper mindset. Many folks are reporting that their obsessive eating habits have been cured by fasting. It's powerful, and radical, information. I highly recommend you learn more about fasting for weight loss.

The second thing you need to do for weight loss is quit doing cardio and start focusing on short, burst exercise weight loss workouts that include interval training. Interval training involves alternating between short periods of hard exercise and short periods of very easy exercise. You do a regular warm-up and cool-down, and in-between you do about 6 intervals. This program takes only 20 minutes but works brilliantly to burn belly fat and help men and women with weight loss. Using an interval training program, most women can lose 14 pounds in 12 weeks, while men can achieve weight loss of thirty pounds in less than 90 days. There are dozens of ways to do interval training, and all of them will help you with your weight loss.

Finally, the third radical weight loss strategy is to stop going to the gym and start doing more bodyweight exercises to burn fat at home. Sounds crazy, considering we've been told over and over again that we need to go to a fancy, commercial gym for a weight loss workout, but you can work your body as hard, if not harder, at home with simple bodyweight exercises. And that's what weight loss is all about, short burst exercise sessions that burn calories and allow you to live a reduced-stress lifestyle. Bodyweight exercises save you time, money, and mental energy that you can devote to other components of your life, and help you reduce your stress. I truly believe that reducing your stress will help with weight loss.

Combine bodyweight exercises with interval training and fasting for weight loss, and you'll lose more weight faster than ever.

Monday, October 25, 2010

7 Ways To Get Motivated For Your Workout

There will be days (everyday?) when you don't feel like doing your workout.

Sometimes you don't want to get out of bed.

Sometimes you don't want to leave your office because you feel like there are too many deadlines (but this is when you need a workout the most!).

Sometimes you don't want to end story time with the kids only to head down to the basement gym.

It even happens to me.

But I knew how I'd feel like a million bucks after the workout.

And in the end, I know I can't let myself become "soft" and start skipping workouts. I have to lead by example.

But if you are set on achieving a goal, then when it's workouttime, come heck or high water you've got to bear down and do the job.

So here are 7 ways to get motivated for your workout and to get you inspired to get through your workout.
1) Reward yourself. Finish your workout and treat yourself to a magazine, a TV show, some extra time with your family, some new songs for your IPOD, or even a little extra time for yourself.

2) Or set up a punishment for missing workouts. Skip the workout, put $20 into a jar to spend on home repairs. Make sure your spouse controls the jar.

3) Review your goals everyday and every night. Keeping your goals fresh in your mind will help you stay on track.

4) Realize that the hardest part of the workout is often getting your butt to the gym. Once you get 5 minutes into the workout, you will be over the hump. So tell yourself, "I'll just go in and do 1 set of the first 2 exercises, then I can go". Next thing you know, you'll have done the entire workout.

5) Visualize yourself doing a great workout and finishing strong. Get yourself mentally prepared and you will literally have better workouts each time.

6) Crank the tunes. Seriously, nothing motivates like music.

7) Get social support. If you have a workout partner, you'll feel like crap if you let them down. Or become accountable to everyone in the Turbulence Training workout forums...if you don't post your workouts, they'll track you down and demand to know why you've fallen off track! So online or offline, get everyone on your side!
Now get out there and kick the fat to the curb!

Thursday, October 21, 2010

3 Ways to Burn Belly Fat

There are only 3 ways to burn belly, and supplements, diet pills, cleanses, and detox diets are not the ways to do it. Instead, I'm going to give you three advanced strategies to help you burn belly fat and get a flat stomach in less than 90 days, even if you have to lose 30 pounds of weight.

The first secret to burning stomach fat is to eat a weight loss diet of whole, natural foods, eliminating any high-calorie foods in modified forms. Start building your fat burning diet around fruits (yes, you can lose fat while eating a lot of fruit), vegetables, nuts, and a wide-variety of protein sources.

Avoid all foods in a bag or box. This even means cutting back on pasta, bread, and definitely breakfast cereals. There are very few breakfast cereals that can survive on a belly fat burning plan. Too many breakfast cereals are loaded with added sugar, and contain a lot of calories for small portion sizes. As a result of the small portion sizes and added sugar, you end up hungry soon after you eat breakfast cereals and this will not help you burn belly fat.

Eat whole, natural foods at every meal and you will be full and satisfied, and you'll have a lot of physical and mental energy for exercise. You don't have to become a vegetarian, but you need to avoid the hidden calories and sugar in all carbohydrate foods. In fact, if you eat lots of fruits and vegetables, you can eat a lot of protein to help you burn belly fat. Finally, eat raw nuts, not nuts that have been roasted in oil and covered in salt.
Nutrition is the most important part of a belly fat burning program, in fact, it's probably going to be responsible for more than half of your fat burning results, so don't skip step number one. But once you have your nutrition under control, you can focus on increasing the intensity of your exercise program.

To burn belly fat, I want you to stop doing cardio, and focus instead on interval training. If you don't know what interval training is, let me show you how this modified cardio workout can help you burn belly fat. First, you start off with a warm-up, as you would any cardio workout. Second, you alternate between periods of hard exercise and easy exercise. Your hard exercise intervals should be 10-20% harder than a normal cardio intensity, but should last only 30-60 seconds to burn belly fat. Follow each work interval with an easy recovery interval for twice as long as the work interval. The pace in your recovery interval should be so easy you'll think you are doing the cool-down portion of your workout. Repeat the hard-easy interval sequence three times if you are a beginner, and up to six times if you are fit. Finally, finish off with 3-5 minutes of easy exercise as the cool-down portion of your belly fat burning workout.

The third secret to burn belly fat at home is to use bodyweight and dumbbell resistancde training exercises in supersets, so that you get a short, but intense belly fat burning workout that might increase your muscle mass (if you want that) or increase your metabolism (everybody wants that!).

You only need to do 4 resistance training exercises in a belly fat burning workout. One exercise needs to work the legs, another exercise needs to work the pushing muscles, a third exercise needs to work the upper back pulling muscles, and the fourth exercise needs to be a total-body ab exercise. By doing this routine, you've hit all the major fat burning hot zones of the body to help you burn belly fat. Do your resistance training workout before the interval training for maximum muscle results and to burn belly fat fast.

Eat To Lose Weight

Not sure what to eat to lose weight? Well, today you are going to get my politically incorrect advice! I’m known for telling it like it is, and most people (the lazy ones) don’t want to hear it, and they get mad at me. But the folks who do listen often lose 5-10 pounds in 2 weeks.

First, let’s talk about what you must not eat to lose weight. You have to toss any foods from your pantry that contain added sugar or hydrogenated oils (also known as trans-fats). These types of foods are processed, refined junk foods that contain a lot of calories.

You’ll even find both of those nasty ingredients in most breakfast cereals. In fact, breakfast cereals are often a bad food to have if you want to eat to lose weight. Many have added sugar and hydrogenated oils, even the so-called healthy cereals.

I also recommend cutting out most modified carbohydrate foods, from granola bars to muffins, from white flour pasta to most breads. You are much better off eating more fruits and vegetables and raw nuts. You also need to increase your protein intake, but nearly as much as most bodybuilders will tell you.

In fact, the last thing you should do is take fat loss advice from a bodybuilder. Most of those folks use drugs to get bigger and drugs to lose fat, and that’s politically stupid advice. So stay away from anyone that lives an unhealthy lifestyle to get a good body.

Your focus should be on making baby steps every day to improve your diet. Take my client Katherine for example. She started off 15 pounds overweight and eating a bad diet, but wanted to eat to lose weight. At first, she only ate one apple and a small salad per day, with everything else being processed foods.

Her first step – like yours will probably be – was to rediscover how GOOD real food tastes. She added a banana and an orange to breakfast, replacing her high-sugar cereal. She added the fruit to a plain yogurt and added 11 chopped almonds (half an ounce) in the mix. She also had a Green Tea instead of coffee with cream and sugar.

Katherine found that she wasn’t hungry again till lunch time, and didn’t experience mid-morning drowsiness with that plan. At lunch, she started to add more vegetables to her salad.

After a week, she cut out her tuna sandwich and added chicken or salmon to her salad in what we called, “her power lunch salad”. She’s now up to 10 different vegetables in her power salad, and she doesn’t have after lunch sleepiness anymore. Now that’s how to eat to lose weight!

Since Katherine exercises with Turbulence Training right after work and while she watches Oprah, she needed a late afternoon snack. In the past, she had given in to the vending machine (on bad days) and even on good days was eating a granola bar filled with sugar and trans-fats. But the granola bar rarely, if ever, filled her up.

So we made her afternoon snack an apple, 11 almonds, and more Green Tea. This kept her full until dinner time. In fact, it kept her so full she moved her dinner time back almost a full hour (and this allowed her husband to do his Turbulence Training workout before dinner as well).

By moving dinner to 7pm, she had fewer urges to eat at night while she relaxed in front of the TV for her favorite show at 9pm. Before she knew it, it was bedtime and she didn’t have any desire for late night binging. Now that’s how to eat to lose weight!

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

How To Get Six Pack Abs At Home

If you rely on boring, back-breaking abdominal crunches and sit-ups to burn
belly fat, you'll never lose the ugly belly fat covering your abs. To get
more fat burning results in less workout time, use fat burning interval
training and total-body abdominal exercises instead.

You don’t even have to do ab workouts everyday to get six pack abs at home. In fact, one of the secrets of top fat loss trainers is to drop boring, repetitive ab exercises and replace them with total-body abdominal exercises you only need to do for a few minutes three times per week.

The best way to lose belly fat isn’t ab training or even long, slow boring
cardio in the “Fat Burning Zone”. In fact, in a recent study, subjects did
40 minutes of slow cardio three times per week for 15 weeks but didn't lose
a single inch of stomach fat. However, only 20 minutes of interval training
helped subjects significantly reduce belly fat.

So the truth is, you don’t need hundreds of ab exercises, or even expensive
fancy ab machines down at your local gym. In fact, research shows that most
abdominal machines in gyms are extremely DANGEROUS for your low back! But
you can do simple, safe, and effective abdominal bodyweight exercises and
interval training at home to flatten your stomach.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

5 Biggest Ab Workout Mistakes

Why is it that everyone is working out to get 6-pack abs, but almost no one has a flat stomach or defined abs? It's because most people are making big mistakes in their ab workouts. Here are the 5 biggest ab workout mistakes that you are making that lead to injury, ineffective workouts, and little results. If you fix these mistakes, you'll double the effectiveness of your ab workouts and you'll be a lot closer to getting the abs you want.

Mistake #1 - You have no intensity in your ab workouts.

Don't get me wrong, it's hard to do hundreds and hundreds of crunches in an ab workout and you can get a burn in your abs, but that doesn't mean the ab workout is intense. What you need to do to get more 6-pack abs results in less workout time is to increase the intensity of the ab exercises you use.
For example, most folks do hundreds of crunches in an ab workout but don't get results. On the other hand, if you increase the intensity of the ab exercises you use, therefore decreasing the number of repetitions you can do in each set, you'll put more stress on the muscle and force more change in your abs.
So get rid of the crunches and add exercises like Stability Ball Rollouts to your ab workouts, which you can't do hundreds of times. Get rid of lying reverse crunches and use hanging knee raises - with good form - instead and do sets of 8-12 repetitions rather than sets of 30-50 reps.

Mistake #2 - You do too many crunches with bad form leading to a pain in the neck.

At first I thought this was just an occasional rookie ab workout mistake, but I've found more and more people are searching the Internet looking for pain relief because their necks are sore from doing too many crunches the wrong way. The best way to avoid neck pain from crunches is to avoid the exercise in the first place. Crunches are a waste of your ab workout time. For all the time people spend doing crunches, they don't get a proportional improvement in their 6-pack abs. Don't spend any more ab workout time doing crunches. Instead, use more effective exercises such as Cable Abs, Stability Ball Rollouts, Stability Ball Jackknives, and Hanging Knee Raises.

Mistake #3 - You do too many exercises where you round your back in spinal flexion

Have you or a friend ever injured your back by bending over? That movement is called spinal flexion, and can lead to herniated discs because every time your round forward, bend over, or round your back, you compress the intervertebral discs between the vertebral bones in your spine. It's like squeezing down on one side of a giant hamburger and having the condiments come out the other side. Essentially, that's what happens when you herniated a disc or get a bulging disc. So you need to avoid exercises that require spinal flexion, such as crunches or sit-ups to protect your back.

Mistake #4 - You do not brace your abs in every exercise.

When training clients, I tell them before each and every exercise to "brace their abs as if someone was about to punch them in the stomach". Bracing your abs protects your back, and also works your abs, so that every exercise in your workout becomes an ab exercise and every workout becomes an ab workout. It is a simple, easy to remember tip that will help you strengthen your back and sculpt your abs.

Mistake #5 - You don't train your abs for endurance to help your low back.

While it is important to add resistance and intensity to the exercises in your ab workout, research also shows that you need to build endurance with basic abdominal exercise holds like Planks and Side Planks. Dr. Stuart McGill, a leading expert in low back fitness and performance, has found that the more endurance men and women have in these ab exercises, the lower their risk of back problems. Surprisingly, these exercises are also helpful in building a set of 6-pack abs and you can do the Plank exercises on a daily basis in ab workouts to build your endurance. Beginners should start with 10 second holds, while advanced fitness levels can do longer holds (up to 2-minutes for the Plank) or a series of repetitions of 10 second holds for each exercise. Both are effective ways to build abdominal muscle endurance.
Avoid these 5 ab workout mistakes and you'll double the effectiveness of your ab workouts. Add interval training and resistance training and you will soon have a flat stomach and visible abs.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Top 5 Nutrition Weight Loss Myths

Most people think nutrition is really confusing, but if you want weight loss, choosing the right diet plan isn't that hard. The most important thing you need to do is match your weight loss diet with your personality and your day-to-day environment. But that brings up conflict with some of the biggest nutrition myths you might have heard about.

Myth #1 - You must eat 6 meals per day for weight loss.
Eating 6 meals per day works for weight loss, but you don't have to do it. You can eat 3 meals per day and still lose fat. The more important matters are the foods you eat, and how much food you eat. If you eat McDonald's six times per day, you will not lose weight.
But if you eat 3 meals per day of whole, natural foods, you will burn belly fat and lose weight quickly. Whole, natural foods include fruits, vegetables, and raw nuts. Add enough protein to your diet and you have a great meal plan, no matter how many times you eat per day. Of course, you must make sure you eat fewer calories than you need.

Myth #2 - You must eat 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight.
Bodybuilders have been using this rule forever, but it doesn't fit all people, especially those who need a lot of weight loss. This nutrition tip actually becomes a myth if you are overweight. For example, if you are a 225 pound woman, but 40% body fat, it wouldn't be necessary for you to eat 225 grams of protein. In fact, in rare cases, this could lead to health problems.
In another example, if you are a 325 pound guy, but 35% body fat, this nutrition myth will also over-estimate your need for protein. A better recommendation is 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body weight, but most people will not know this number. So it is easier to stick with basic recommendations. An overweight woman who wants to lose weight should aim for 100-150 grams of protein per day. That will be enough for her needs, and to help control appetite, as protein is very good at that. For a guy, 150-200 grams of protein is a safe, effective range for supporting fat loss.

Myth #3 - Fruit makes you fat.
This myth is ridiculous. Eating fruit does not stop weight loss. Fruit is healthy, and contains a lot of fiber. While it does contain fruit sugars, fruits are not calorie dense compared to muffins and other types of foods, and it would be hard to eat too many calories from fruit. Eating fruit won't stop your weight loss, and it does not make you fat.

Myth #4 - You can eat negative calorie foods for weight loss.
This is such a joke. A negative calorie food is a food that is claimed to require more calories for digestion than the food provides. A classic example people like to use is celery. Unfortunately, it is not true. While it takes some calories to chew and digest celery, it does not take more calories than what the celery provides. I've read articles that claimed bananas, apples, watermelon, and many other fruits and vegetables are negative calorie foods. However, none of this is true. What a myth!

Myth #5 - You can eat all the fat free food you want for weight loss.
Most fat free foods contain a lot of sugar and calories, and it is easy to over-eat these foods. They were very popular for weight loss in the 1990's, and included the classic fat free Snackwells cookies. Unfortunately, many people learned the hard way that these fat free foods were not good for weight loss.
Avoid falling prey to these 5 nutrition myths, and you'll have an easier time with weight loss and making sense of nutrition programs.

Boost Your Metabolism for Weight Loss

If you suffer from a slow metabolism, you are going to have a hard time with weight loss. You might even gain weight, even though you think you are doing fat burning cardio and eating a low fat diet. Fortunately, there are ways to improve your weight loss diet and cardio exercise program to boost your metabolism, burn more calories, lose more fat, and finally achieve the weight loss you want.

The three most important things you need to do to boost your metabolism are:

1. Change your weight loss diet so you are eating more protein, more healthy fats, more nuts, and more fruits and vegetables.

2. Increase the intensity of your weight loss cardio exercise sessions so that you are doing either interval training or high-intensity cardio exercise workouts.

3. Add resistance training to your weight loss program. If you are already doing resistance training two to three times per week, you need to increase the intensity of each workout by using more resistance (i.e. adding more weight or doing more challenging bodyweight exercises) and decreasing the number of repetitions you do per set.
Let's start by improving your weight loss diet to help boost your metabolism from slow to normal. You might even be able to significantly increase your metabolism from normal to super-fast if you follow all of these metabolism boosting secrets for weight loss.
Your diet should not be low-fat or low-carbohydrate. However, there are certain types of fats to avoid and certain carbohydrates that should be left out of your weight loss diet.

First, don't eat any processed foods from a bag or a box. Foods such as chips, crackers, cookies, and pastries all contain "bad" fats (trans-fats) and processed carbohydrates. These are bad for your health and will make you gain weight. In addition, seemingly harmless foods such as rice cakes, pretzels, and "trans-fat free" foods still contain processed foods with very few nutrients and a lot of calories. Plus, those foods don't fill you up and you'll be hungry again soon. It's also hard to stop eating them.

Eliminate those foods from your weight loss diet and you'll feel less "sluggish". The next step is to eat more protein.

Women should get 100 grams of protein per day and men should get 150 grams of protein per day. Protein contains 4 calories per gram and might help boost your metabolism. Don't expect miracles for your metabolism, but replacing processed foods with protein from chicken and other lean meats, or even protein shakes, will help you achieve fast weight loss.

Finally, add more whole, natural foods such as raw nuts, fruits, and vegetables. Again, these won't skyrocket your metabolism, but whole, natural foods will help you with fast weight loss if you replace processed carbohydrates.

As for weight loss supplements, nothing works. Most weight loss diet pills are nothing more than glorified caffeine pills, full of tiny amounts of other ineffective ingredients.

Even Green Tea capsules do nothing for weight loss or boosting your metabolism in the long term. I recommend drinking lots of Green Tea for health reasons, but don't expect any metabolism miracles.

Now that your weight loss diet has been perfected to help you boost your metabolism, you can focus on replacing your slow, boring cardio workouts with interval training.

Research shows that interval training burns more belly fat than slow cardio, and it might be due to an increase in post-exercise metabolism. Whatever the reason, there are now several studies that show interval training and high-intensity cardio beat low-intensity exercise (LIE) hands-down in weight loss research studies. Use the Turbulence Training interval workouts to boost your metabolism for weight loss.

You can also use the Turbulence Training resistance training workouts to burn more calories and possibly boost your metabolism for up to 36 hours after your weight loss resistance training exercise session. But you won't get the benefits if you lift light weights for 15 repetitions. You must challenge your muscles with fewer repetitions or harder bodyweight exercises. If you put "turbulence" on your muscles, they will respond by burning more calories.

Use these three secrets to boost your metabolism for weight loss, and you'll no longer struggle with fat loss plateaus. You'll lose 2 pounds or more per week once you get started boosting your metabolism to burn fat.

Goal Setting for Weight Loss

Goal setting for weight loss is one of the most underrated aspects of a weight loss program, because people only think about diet and exercise. They forget about the importance of motivation for weight loss. After all, if you are not motivated to continue your exercise program, you are going to quit and have a hard time losing weight.
But let's say you spent some time on goal setting. If you do that, you will always have benchmarks to look at and goals to keep you on track on your weight loss journey. Goal setting is underused and undervalued but people should be spending more time doing it because it really just gives you a road map to success.

You can also set process-oriented goals or outcome-oriented goals. A process goal refers to the acts that you'll do along the way, such as eating smaller meals each day, or exercising three times per week, or even planning your meals each week. On the other hand, an outcome oriented goal refers to losing a certain number of pounds each month, or increasing your strength by 10 percent in 2 months.

It is important to set both types of goals. You must have process goals because you can control them more than outcome goals. Sometimes we set outcome goals that are too lofty for our physical abilities, but if we are at least meeting our process goals, we can still know that we are on track to succeed.

If you set goals, you at least have something that will guide you along your weight loss journey, and I think you should keep those goals in front of you all the time so you check them on a daily basis, or at least a couple times per week go back and look and see if you're on track for your goals, your long-term and your short-term ones, and really use those to help guide you in the decisions that you make every day. And the more you can do that and actually use those goals as a guideline, you are really going to stay motivated.

I see goal setting as one of the most important motivational tools in a weight loss program, and I know that all of the Turbulence Training Weight Loss Transformation Contest winners all used goal setting to lose weight. You can't succeed without goal setting. All you need to do is take 30 minutes and set 3 short term and 3 long term goals today, so do it right now to help your weight loss results.

3 Cool Workout Tips to Switch Up A Boring Workout Routine

If you want to switch up a boring workout routine, here are 3 cool workout tips that you can use to switch up your workouts without sacrificing results.

1) Do the opposite exercise workout

If you are doing weights, try using bodyweight exercises instead, and vice-versa. So let’s say you are doing dumbbell chest presses, switch to an advanced pushup instead. Or maybe you are doing db rows, so switch to pull-ups, chin-ups, or bodyweight rows. Doing lunges? Switch to Bulgarian split squats and use the 1 & 1/2 rep style.

2) Use opposite style rest periods (Take extra rest between exercises)
In this method, I want you to take 1 minute between exercises and 2 minutes between supersets. The extra rest will allow you to lift heavier weights. But that will make your workout longer, so cut out the third superset.

3) Opposite programming supersets to circuit
If you are doing supersets, switch to doing all the exercises in a circuit. you’ll use lighter weights (slightly), but possibly get your workout done faster. A great change of pace without sacrificing results.

By the way…

Have you told yourself over and over again that you just can’t do something, even though you have nothing to base that on? What would happen if you just started believing the OPPOSITE? Simple little shift in mindset. But it could change your life.