Mar 8 2010

Lose Your Belly: Intense Fat Burning With These 5 Tips

Wanna lose your belly? Well make sure you’re following these 5 very important tips:

Tip #1: Short, Intense Workouts

Shorter, more intense workouts that last just 20-40 minutes will help you boost your metabolic rate and challenge your cardiovascular system at the same time. According to Dr. James A Timmons of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, as little as 7.5 minutes per exercise per week makes a huge difference!

  • He discovered that sedentary young men who did just 15 minutes of all-out sprinting spread out over 2 weeks dramatically improved their ability to metabolize sugar. The high intensity program also directly reduced the men’s blood sugar levels.
  • This find is not only important for diabetics who must learn to control their blood sugar levels, but is also important for individuals trying to lose fat. After an individual eats, they experience a sudden rise in blood sugar levels (also known as an insulin spike).
  • There are many reasons why you want to minimize insulin spikes if your goal is fat loss. One of them is that insulin spikes shut down the output of Human Growth Hormone (HGH). HGH is an absolutely vital hormone in your fat loss plan.


Tip #2: Optimize Human Growth Hormone

Human Growth Hormone is an extremely powerful substance in the body. One of it’s primary tasks is the regulation of our metabolism. This is why HGH is crucial to fat burning, since increased metabolism is one of the main important factors in greater fat loss.

  • There are two things that determine how much HGH will be released: Sleep, Exercise, and Nutrition. In the first tip, I stated that intense workouts reduced men’s blood sugar levels. It is also a fact that fit men and women have a less tendency to experience insulin spikes after women.
  • In other words, getting fitter will help you get even more fit. So short, intense workouts is just way to optimize your HGH. The other way is to get more sleep. HGH is released during the first part of our sleep cycle. Finally, in terms of nutrition, cut down on your intake of carbohydrates.
  • Certain types of carbohydrates raise your blood sugar higher than others. One scale to use when choosing your foods is the Glycemic Index. Make sure you to choose more foods with a lower Glycemic Index to minimize insulin spikes throughout the day.


Tip #3: Post-Workout Nutrition

Post-workout nutrition refers to what you consume after a workout. After an intense workout, you’re entering a catabolic state where your muscle glycogen is depleted. Catabolism refers to the breakdown of muscle mass. Muscle glycogen is where your muscles get energy to perform daily tasks.

  • The opposite of a catablic state is an anabolic state. This is where conditions are optimal to increasing your lean muscle mass. Increasing lean muscle mass is absolutely vital in your fight against fat. The more muscle you have, the higher your metabolic rate, and the more fat you will burn.
  • It’s like a long chain of events. If there is one link that is weak or broken, it can derail your entire fat burning efforts. So what do you do? Ingest a quick shake right after your workout that has the right combination of carbohydrates and amino acids, causing an insulin spike.
  • This spike will help deliver vital nutrients to your muscles. “But I thought that insulin spikes were bad for fat loss?” They are, but right after an intense, muscle building workout, you need those carbohydrates to prevent an severe loss in muscle mass.


Tip #4: Muscle Building Workouts

Muscle building workouts are absolutely crucial to your fat loss plan. First of all, they help you burn calories during the actual workout. Second, they raise your metabolism for up to 39 hours after the workout. Hence, if you trained every 39 hours, you would be in a constant state of fat burning.

  • If you were extremely lazy and did not want to perform interval training or make dietary changes, then all you would need to perform is 15 high intensity strength training sessions per month. A recent study found that 15 weight training sessions can help you burn off an extra 2 pounds of fat.
  • At the end of the year, that’s 24lbs of fat! If you were not interested in dramatic body transformation, than you could easily get fitter and look better, just by lifting weights. This approach will take you longer, but it will work. On top of that, muscle is more metabolically active than fat.
  • Studies have shown that a pound of muscle helps you burn an extra 35 – 50 calories per day. So, if you put on 2 lbs of muscle mass per month, then by the end of the year, you’d be burning off 840 – 1200 calories per day extra!


Tip #5: Avoid Alcohol

Many individual will go out to a bar on the weekends and order a “light” or “low calorie” beer. I’ve seen an increase in these kinds of products in the past few years. Make no mistake: alcohol can literally destroy your fat burning effects. It’s not just the empty calories.

  • Alcohol has also been shown to decrease your Testosterone levels. Of course, this won’t happen if you drink just once a month. But, who drinks once a month? If you make it a habit to go out and drink one evening, your friends will ask you to come along the next evening, and 2-3 drinks later you realized you just reversed all your efforts of the past week.
  • Instead, avoid alcohol completely while trying to burn fat. No, I’m not telling you to not have a social life. But there are other things you can do that are extremely fun that does not involve alcohol. Go out to the movies. Go to the gym for a group workout (lots of fun!).
  • Go for a jog. Go to the park for a walk. Sit down and actually have a real conversation with someone you trust.

Start implementing these 5 tips and you’ll experience a dramatic increase in the amount of fat you lose. By the way, the only person I’ve seen who regularly implements these tips with his workouts and nutritional advice is Craig Ballantyne. He just released a brand new set of 19 DVD’s which are designed to give you the best chance at achieving a leaner, healthier body.

You can click here to learn more about this DVD set, but I don’t want you to buy the set. Nope. Not yet. I’m working on trying to get him to drop the price so you save an extra $100. So, instead, sign up to this mailing list, and I’ll keep you posted.

Simply enter your name and email below and I’ll let you know the moment he decides to drop the price. Plus, just for signing up, I’ll send a free, 4-week workout your way. Sign up below:


Mar 4 2010

Double Edged Fat Loss: The Fastest Way To Get A Six Pack Without Doing Any Sit-Ups

hey everybody,

Just found out that the entire hosting company went down and this shut down Dr. Kareem’s site for about 5 hours today. A bunch of people emailed him and asked if they could have an extension with the free info and as a result. The answer is ‘yes.’ It’s been extended until midnight tonight (March 5th) EST. Please make sure not to miss this deadline.

Anyway, as a Thank You for your patience & dedication to fat loss, Dr. Kareem wrote an absolutely AWESOME article for you. Here you go:

*The Fastest Way To Get A Six Pack Without Doing Any Sit-Ups*

by Dr. Kareem F. Samhouri, CSCS, HFS

*Metabolic Fat Loss & Fitness Expert*


Sit-ups suck.

They’re boring, they make it hard to breathe, and they are not nearly intense enough to get a great result. Think about it – when’s the last time you couldn’t get your 6th rep of a sit up?

They don’t work muscular strength. They work muscular endurance – most of us need more muscular strength, not endurance.

If muscular endurance were all we needed, then why does everyone on the Cat Walk of treadmills at L.A. Fitness look the same month after month after month?
Did you ever think about that before?

The same guys and gals running at 9mph, sweating their last drip of H2O away as they sprint for 45 minutes never seem to change shape. They look the same in my gym as they do in yours. That’s not because cardio is bad; that’s because they have the wrong strategy in mind.
Do *you* have the right strategy in mind?
Let’s take Jenny Brown and Eric Foster for example:

Jenny Brown doesn’t look very fat, but she’s not happy with herself at all. You see, she’s never been really strong, and she’s been struggling with her weight for years.

Her family is all heavier than she is. They don’t seem to think there’s an issue, and they keep eating her favorite foods in front of her. Each time she’s tempted, she gets on an Elliptical or Treadmill and tries to ‘burn off all the calories.’

In the first 3 weeks of doing this, she actually manages to lose half the weight she’s been trying to lose for years – she loses 7.5 pounds – only another 7.5 to go.

3 more weeks go by, and now Jenny gets on the scale again – she weighs an extra pound.

“That’s horrible,” she thinks, as her pants all of the sudden feel tight and her shoulders slump.

Now she decides her chest is saggy too, and she just feels old, but she keeps at it.

3 more weeks, down 2 pounds – she’s now down 1 pound from her original amazing streak of weight loss.

Only thing, Jenny got fatter. She lost muscle. When we took her body fat measurement, now 9 weeks in, she went up by 2%. It’s only a matter of time until Jenny puts all of her weight back on… while continuing to watch what she eats. This *totally* sucks.
Ok, so how about Eric Foster?

Eric Foster is a former athlete, who used to run high school track and field. Since then, work got crazy (and so did drinking on the weekends), and he now weighs an extra 60 pounds. He exercises for half the time Jenny does, but he basically only warms up, then interval trains, and then does a series of carefully planned out giant sets, challenging his body with new exercises every time he works out. Even though he feels uncoordinated half the time, and he isn’t lifting all that much weight (in fact, because of his weight issue, he’s basically down to mostly bodyweight without having the onset of low back pain.)
3 weeks go by – Eric’s down 6 pounds – 54 pounds to go.

“Sweet” he says to himself, “I’m going to hit my goal in another 9 weeks. I’ll be there before summer.”

3 more weeks go by, now he’s down 12 pounds. “On pace,” he says to himself. 3 more weeks go by (now on week 9), and he decides to step on the scale during a flex-break from staring at himself in the mirror.

“Oh my God,” he exclaims – “I’m down another 9 pounds – how could this be?” So Eric flew off to the local gym and had his body fat assessed – down 4%!
I know why Eric’s down 9 more pounds & lost 4% body fat. He built muscle.

That muscle kicked his metabolism into over drive, and his body started craving more food. He also chose exercises that helped ‘organize’ his nervous system & recruit more muscle.

He fed his body, as most former athletes know to do, and it burned up all the calories and then some.

His muscle raised his metabolism.

The dynamic exercise routine fooled Eric’s body into thinking he needed more muscle to cope with “the challenging new environment” he lived in.

Jenny’s plain old, boring exercise routine taught her body to cope with this increased demand by lowering her heart rate and blood pressure (both good things) so she could last longer.

Obviously, Eric’s body changed more and his program was more effective for fat loss.
*The Moral Of The Story:*

Eric just needed to know how to speak ‘Neuro’ and he was all set. Once he wasn’t speaking ‘baby talk’ to his body anymore, and he learned to have a conversation, the work was already done for him.

So what’s the purpose of exercising so much if you’re not going to look amazing after all that sweat and hard work?

In Double Edged Fat Loss, I teach you how to Exercise Less, Benefit More.

I hope you’ll join me for the next 2 weeks as I unveil 7 Fat Loss Videos that put Jenny & Eric’s story to shame. As it turned out, it had nothing to do with Eric ‘being a boy,’ did it?
*******************************************

PS – don’t forget – today is the LAST day to get all 7 Fat Loss Videos
+ a bonus video presentation & teleseminar with Joel Marion, Vince Delmonte,
& Dr. K (it’s up there right now)

Get access to the members’ area and see what’s inside:

DoublEdgedFatLoss.com


Mar 4 2010

Double Edged Fat Loss: Ab Definition Comes From the Back

Dr. Kareem Samhouri, creater of Double Edged Fat Loss, shares with you some important tips on ab definition:

One thing that most people who train for improved abs do not realize is that they need to train their backs at the same time. Without having a proper balance between abdominal and low back strength, there is a change in posture, ultimately resulting in a decreased physique, decreased oxygenation to muscles, and decreased endurance. This means that you will spend more time in the gym, take less away from your workout, and feel more tired the next day. Sounds terrible, right?

One of the greatest secrets that I teach my clients is to strengthen their low back musculature in order to increase the efficacy of their abdominal workouts. Through proper low back strengthening, they are able to normalize their pelvic positions, thereby increasing the stretch on their skin in the abdomen. This increase in stretch, or better posed decrease in slack, results in showing the muscles that lie underneath. With the 3 step plan you see below, you may just find that you have had more abdominal definition than you knew:

Step 1: Learn how to perform stability exercises rather than crunches. Functionally, our abs work to stabilize our bodies while walking, standing from a chair, or sitting down. This is referred to as an ‘isometric’ contraction, meaning that the muscle is contracting, but no movement is taking place. Whenever your abs are working isometrically, it’s a good bet that your low back is helping stabilize from the other side. Think about it, if my abs are firing and my low back extensors are not, would I not bend forward?

Step 2: Spend double the time on your back than you do on your front. Take for granted the fact that most people work on the muscles they can see in the mirror when working out. If you simply try to counterbalance this for awhile, you will be blown away by the results. By working on muscles such as your lower trapezius, middle trapezius, rhomboids, posterior deltoids, gluteals, and multifidi, you will stand far ahead of your competition. Your body will assume a better posture, your circulation will improve, the oxygen delivery to your muscles will improve, and your metabolism will increase. All of these factors will drive your results through the roof when attempting to improve abdominal definition and strength.

Step 3: Change it up. Most people perform the same exercises every other time that they work out. Instead, try to vary joint angles and positions, muscles targeted, surfaces used, or anything else you can think of in order to ’shock your system’ into thinking it’s never exercises before. Do you remember the first time you worked out? You were pretty sore, right? Me too. There is a reason for this: our bodies were producing a ton of lactic acid, which produced soreness, and resulted in a repair process that uses energy to get rid of the acid. This energy equals increased metabolism. If you increase metabolism, you’ll hit your goals before you know it!

If you’d like to see amazing results with your ab strengthening program in the gym, all you have to do is follow this three step plan. By targeting your muscles the way they are intended to be used, improving posture, and mixing things up, you will be blown away by the results.

Click here to learn more about Double Edged Fat Loss


Jan 27 2010

Turbulence Training Workouts for Obese People

Obese individuals can still follow typical Turbulence Training workouts. However, they just need to lower the intensity and change around some of the exercise selection.

The main Turbulence Training principles remain the same:

  • Use Multi-Muscle Exercises
  • Organize them into Supersets
  • Use Interval Training for Cardio

One of the best ways to help you with your intervals is to use the GymBoss Interval Timer. It costs just $19.95, and you can program it to help you keep track of any sort of intervals you may use. Click here to grab yours today.

According to Craig Ballantyne, as long as your doctor approves you for exercise, you’re ready to go. In fact, he’s trained men over 300lbs and women over 225lbs using Turbulence Training principles.

If you are obese, you want to start off with the Introductory and Beginner level workouts included in the original Turbulence Training Manual. In these workouts, 90% of the exercises have you lying down on the ground.

Hence, the workouts will be easier than other TT workouts for obese individuals. But, they’ll still be intense, and they’ll still provide results. If anything, they’ll build up your body so that you can perform tougher workouts.

Obese individuals need to get stronger, and learn how to use and move their bodies again. The best way to accomplish this is to use bodyweight-only movements.

However, many people can barely move. So performing pushups or squats is out of the question. A better alternative would be to use dumbbells to improve overall strength and mobility.

Most people work backwards. They do a lot of cardio to try an melt the fat off, and then try to build up their muscles with weight training. This will only lead to injury.

Craig Ballantyne warns of is steady state cardio. This is especially dangerous for obese individuals. Too much jogging, cycling, or aerobic exercise will lead to overuse injuries.

On top of that, assuming that the Cardio does help an individual lose weight. They’ll be much weaker after the cardio, then before doing the cardio. Instead, do your strength training first, then try and lose the fat with the cardio.

Most likely, if you stick to Turbulence Training guidelines, you won’t need to do too much cardio. Craig’s workouts help boost your metabolic rate. Your metabolic rate is a measure of how many calories your body burns through out the day.

Most obese individuals have very slow metabolic rates. And fat is not very metabolically active. In fact, it takes more calories to maintain a pound of muscle than it does to maintain a pound of fat.

So, putting on muscle will help you lose fat in the long term. There are three things that boost your metabolic rate with regards to exercise:

  • The workout itself
  • The post-training oxygen consumption following the workout
  • The addition of lean muscle mass

I already mentioned how adding lean muscle mass helps you boost your metabolic rate. Now lets take a look at the other two methods:

When you train, your body needs energy. They also produce heat, which is a by product of muscular contraction. The more muscle tissue involved in the exercise that your performing, the more energy is needed and more heat is produced.

This is why Craig Ballantyne sticks to compound, multi-joint movements. After your training, your metabolism will be elevated to help your body recover from the intense workout.

Some studies state that your metabolism stays elevated for up to 48 hours after an intense workout. Regardless of the number, if you train with a Turbulence Training workouts 3 days a week, you’ll be leaner in no time.

Craig Ballantyne has developed hundreds of fitness programs that revolve around the basic concepts of Turbulence Training.

To get an overall introduction to Turbulence Training, you should grab the original Turbulence Training manual. The manual includes everything you need to get started on your fat loss journey. There are workouts for beginners, intermediate, and advanced trainees. If you go through each program separately, in a few months you’d have literally transformed your health and physique. Click here for more information.

For individuals who have had some experience with exercise or even Turbulence Training, then Craig has numerous other workouts specifically designed for women, muscle mass, bodyweight only, abs training, and more.

You need to make the decision today: Are you going to continue to follow pointless, boring workouts and never get any impressive results, or you going to take a chance and try some trully unique ideas using Craig Ballantyne’s workouts? Start today with either one of the Turbulence Training workouts:


Jul 31 2009

Increase your Metabolism

I first realized how big a role metabolism played in fat loss when I read Alwyn Cosgrove’s article on T-mag, titled the Hierarchy of Fat Loss. Cosgrove stated that the most important factor in a fat loss routine is metabolic resistance training. This includes workouts such as complexes, circuits, trisets, and supersets. The idea is to get your heart rate up and keep it up while lifting moderate to heavy weights.

I liked this approach to training much better than doing steady state cardio, and so I gave it a try. By the time I had lost 15 lbs, I had developed four methods vital to fat loss: heavy training, metabolic resistance training, aerobic training, and anaerobic interval training. Then than list was refined to include only metabolic resistance training, heavy training, and eating a lot to maximize your resting metabolic rate. Continue reading


Jul 29 2009

Ignite Your Metabolism With an Interval Training Workout

There are many ways of losing weight out there – calorie counting, steady state cardio, ketogenic diets – just to name a few. But not one of these methods take into account one of the most important attributes of weight loss – boosting your metabolic rate.

Your resting metabolic rate measures the amount of calories that you burn at rest. So it doesn’t really matter how many Continue reading


Feb 4 2008

New Diet and Training Strategies

My goal for the next 6 weeks is to lower my bodyfat percentage. I’ve taken this task before, however I failed due to crash dieting methods. My diet has been the main problem for me as I am 1) limited to what I can eat and 2) live in a culture centered around food. Hence, for me to break out of those habits has been very difficult. I’ve made some great progress and have done things that I thought I could never do. I’ve given up taco bell, soda, and starbucks.

I’ve also cut back on eating restaurant Indian food. Each week, I go to my dad’s store. At around 5 pm, I get really hungy and order some creamy Palak Paneer Saag and 2 to 3 parota. There is obviously nothing in the meal that contributes to my recovery or muscle gain. For those that don’t know, Palak Paneer is Spinach and cheese cooked with spices, lots of salt, oil, and some other things that aren’t good for you. Parota’s are a type of bread, flattened and covered with butter.

The following is a diet I’ve constructed to follow for the next few weeks:

5 AM: Protiein Bar, Oatmeal & Fruit
8 AM: Almonds
11 AM: 2 Veggie Burgers
2 PM: Cottage Cheese
5 PM: Almonds
Dinner – Eat Veggies only

This diet has approximately 150 grams of carbs, and 100 grams of protien. My previous diet consisted of about 220 grams of carbs and 70 grams of protein. I never had a problem with recovery, however I have noticed my weight go from 157 to 155 to 153 then back up to 157. Not sure about this, but I think it has to do with the amount of carbs I eat. Days I eat very little carbs I weigh less. When i eat normally , anything I want, i weight 157. So I know that my metabolism is high because I can eat anything i want and get away with it, however I won’t see any improvement in my body composition.

So the focus of my new diet is the following:

  • Increase or maintain protien to help me maintain muscle mass and strength
  • Lower carbs to burn fat, but don’t drop it too low so that it hinders recovery
  • Both carbs and protein help with recovery, so the idea is to gradually lower carbs to a point where I’m eating low carbs but not hindering recovery. The same thing is true with protein. I want to gradually increase protein intake but not so much that I sacrifice my caloric deficit and store the protien as fat. In other words, everything I eat MUST be burnt up.
  • Carbs should be gradually replaced by healthy fats. Fats also help with recovery and fat burning.
  • I may be extremely carb sensitive, so I may need to lower carbs more than I think I do.

Training wise, I’ll be lifting first thing in the morning. This has to do with scheduling as I would rather do my school work and marketing during the day then have my day interrupted by a workout. It takes me 20 minutes to workout, but about an hour to rest, eat, and mentally recover.

Today’s workout wasn’t as intense as I thought it would be. I’m going to measure my workouts using an intensity scale from 1 to 10 (10 being extremely intense). So I don’t have a set program. I never follow set programs, so I’m better off gradually keeping track of my workouts and making little changes as I go on.

To improve today’s workout, I’m going to be doing the descending sets routine, but instead of just one exercise and resting a minute after each set, I’ll be alternating back and forth between two workouts. I don’t like jsut doing one exercise straight through. Alternating between the two exercises works better because then i don’t have to rest a minute after each set. I’ll just go through all the sets in circuit fashion.

Any thoughts? Suggestions? Feel free to comment.