When you sit down to reflect on the New Year, will you have already gained the average 5 pounds that most Americans put on during the holiday season? Or will you be losing fat and gaining muscle with Turbulence Training?
With the Turbulence Training reports and the following article you can avoid gaining holiday fat while doing the impossible: Losing fat and gaining muscle over the holiday season.
Since one of our least favorite holiday traditions is trying to find room for exercise in a busy schedule, here are 6 tips on how to continue to improve your body over the party season while getting a head start on your New Year’s fitness resolutions.
Step 1 – Train efficiently
Strength training is a very efficient type of exercise, giving you many benefits with a small amount of exercise. During the holiday season, you might be able to get the same benefits by reducing the number of sets per exercise in your workout from 3 to 1. That will help you maintain muscle and strength while significantly reducing your training time.
Interval training is another economical form of exercise. Rather than following up your strength training with 45 minutes on the treadmill, you can get the same (or better!) fat burning results from a much shorter period (20 minutes) of interval training.
Step 2 – Cut the junk
Men’s Fitness Training Adviser Alwyn Cosgrove suggests that we ask ourselves, “Will this help me or not? Is this a positive step or not?” So unless you can justify doing 3 exercises for triceps, then cut the junk from your workout and focus on efficient exercises only.
Step 3 – Warm-up as a workout
You don’t need to spend 10 minutes on the treadmill before you strength train. Instead, you need to prepare specifically for what you are about to do. If your walk to the gym is more than a couple of minutes, you can go right into specific warm-up sets for your strength training exercises.
Step 4 – Whole body vs. split routines
Don’t be a slave to doing chest and arms on Mondays. This eliminates any excuse to skip workouts when you deviate from your “weekly” schedule. Plan your holiday workouts to train either your entire body in one session or alternate between upper body and lower body workouts.
Step 5 – Train your abs with every exercise
The 15 minutes of sit-ups you do each day is a waste of time and is damaging to your lower back. Instead of wasting away on the floor, approach every exercise as an abdominal exercise. Brace your abs (like someone was about to punch you in the stomach) and never let your low back “round”. This body posture is especially important for exercises such as the abdominal plank, squats, push-ups, and all standing exercises.
Step 6 – Plan your workouts
In the spirit of the holidays, I’ve given you a lot of tips to improve your workout efficiency. Now the most important part is up to you to put them into action. So don’t go into the gym without a clue and end up on the cardio machine for an hour because you didn’t know where to start.
Each Turbulence Training workout follows an efficient and effective template to get in and out of the gym in under an hour. You can also choose to do a weights-only or intervals-only workout, therefore cutting even more time off of your trip to the gym.
Turbulence Training Template
5 minutes – 2 warm-up sets for key weight training exercises
15 minutes – Weights
20 minutes – Intervals
5 minutes – Stretch (tight muscles only)
Craig Ballantyne trains athletes and executives in Toronto, and writes for Men’s Fitness magazine. His trademarked Turbulence Training workouts and his comprehensive workout manuals (including “The Ultimate Bodyweight Workout”) are featured on his website Turbulence Training [http://workoutmanuals.com/ModShow/ShowPage/74952].
