It’s very difficult to build up lean muscle mass . You need the proper combination of regular diet, exercise, & hormonal processes. It is a known fact that women do not secrete the same quantity of testosterone which men do to build up the kind of hefty muscles that men hold.

Instead, women secrete high levels of the hormone estrogen. The main reason behind the difficulty that women face while loosing weight is that oestrogen is a hormone that stores fat. Focusing on building lean muscle mass will actually help women with this problem.

We’ve already gone over why women should not be afraid of lifting weights. You won’t build the big, buff bodies of men just be a few sessions of weight training. When you build even 1-2 lbs of muscle, it will have a dramatic, and different look on you then it would a men. Women who lift weights tend to have long, lean sculpted muscles the help them improve their body composition.  This is because increasing lean muscle mass this will help women increase their metabolic rate.
The rate at which your body burns calories is called the metabolic rate of your body. Therefore, the greater your metabolic rate, the more calories you burn at rest. It is good to maintain some muscle rather than fat as muscles are more metabolically active than fat. This means that muscle needs more calories than fat to maintain or sustain them. So concentrate on building lean muscles in order to burn fat.

Weight training helps you more to shape your physique. This is done by body builders all the time. As mentioned earlier, women can learn something from the body builders and it is needless for them to have worries about building huge muscle.

It is quite easy to develop a basic dumbbell workout. All that you have to do is choose three to ten exercises that train your body and organise them into a routine. This simple and a straight method is enough for beginners.

Craig Ballantyne has but together a great, simple program called Turbulence Training. In this program, he shows you how to effectively burn fat using basic weight training and interval training methods. Click here for more information.

He also has a set of workouts specifically designed for women. Click here to learn more about these workouts.

Want more muscle mass? Here’s a great turbulence training workout you can do. It’s workout A from the 8-Week TT for muscle program. Start off with a bodyweight Warm -up of 10 Y-squats, 10 pushups, 8 Diagonal lunges, and 10 Inverted Rows.

A warmup is extremely important, especially if you’re training in a cold environment. A warmup will help you recover much quicker between strength training exercises and prevent injury.

After the Bodyweight warmup, Craig Ballantyne, creator of this workout, wants you you do perform Specific Warm-up sets. We’re going to start off with a 2-board press for 6 repetitions at a tempo of 2-0-1.

Use 50% of the weight you would use in a normal set. A 2-board press, get a partner to hold the board on your chest. Get two 2 by 4’s nailed together, a yoga block, or any other piece of material that is 6 inches thick.

You can also just “wing it” and stop the movement 6 inches above your chest. If you have the board, simply get a partner hold the board on your chest, right where you will bring the bar down.

Keep your feet flat on the floor, legs bent, and upper back flat on the bench, Grip the bar using a normal-width grip and have your spotter help you take the bar down.

If you do not have a spotter, be careful with the bench press. Or, you’re better off performing the movement with dumbbells, and stopping the movement just 6 inches above your chest.

Keep your elbows close to your sides, and lower the bar straight down to the bottom of your chest. Lower the bar on to the block, and then press the bar back up.

It’s important to get your technique right. You can use your warmup set for technique practice. A tempo of 2-0-1 means that you lower the bar with 2 second count, no pause, and press with a 1 second count.

Second warmup exercise is the DB Row. Use a 2-0-1 tempo using 50% of your actual weight. Perform 6 repetitions. Rest 1 minute and perform another set of the same warmup superset using 75% of your actual weight.

Now it’s time to start your workout:

For the first superset, perform 2 board presses for 5 repetitions with a tempo of 2-0-1. Use heavy weights. Rest 1 minute, then move onto DB rows for 6 repetitions.

Rest 2 minutes and repeat the cycle 2 more times for a total of 3 supersets. After the last superset, reduce the weight of the board press by 1/3 and perform as many repetitions as possible.

You will certainly need a spotter for the last set of board presses. Rest 2 minutes, then move onto the next superset. Start off with 8 repetitions of DB Incline Press with a tempo of 2-0-1.

Rest 30 seconds, then perform the V-Chin for 8 repetitions. If you can not do 8 V-Chins, then stop just 1-2 repetitions to failure. For the V-Chin, Hook a small V-grip bar over a chin up bar.

Grip the V-grip with palms facing you. Pull your body up until the chest reaches bar level, or as far as you can go if you’re not strong enough. Lower your body slowly.

Rest 1 minute and repeat this cycle 2 more times.

For the last superset, perform 12 DB chest presses followed by the Barbell Row for 15 repetitions. As you can see, this a full upper body workout. You will perform a lower body workout on a separate day.

Do not perform any sort of cardio, or else you will hinder your mass gains.

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:

• Click here for Turbulence Training Original workout Review
• Click here for Turbulence Training ab Workouts
• Click here for Turbulence Training for Muscle Mass
• Click here for Turbulence Training Bodyweight Only Workouts
• Click here for Turbulence Training for Women

According to some people, you can’t build muscle with bodyweight exercises. Well, you can, but it’s completely “inefficient.” Why? Well, they that you can not achieve progressive overload with bodyweight exercises. I completely disagree.

Progressive Overload means that you steadily add more and more stress upon a muscle to cause it adapt to increasing demands. These so called “experts” claim that progressive overload is not possible with bodyweight exercise since the only way you can increase overload is through adding endless sets and reps. Continue reading

We all know how much I love bodyweight training. When I first began this blog, I was going to focus my training specifically on portable equipment such as dumbbell, kettlebells, and resistance bands. My bodyweight training consisted only of push-ups, pull-ups, squats, and sit-ups.

My bodyweight workouts began to change when I started looking into bodyweight solutions for beginners. Questions such as, “What kind of workouts can I design for people who are unable to perform a single push up?” plagued my mind.

In my search for these answers, I stumbled up on an eBook titled “Workout Without Weights.” After purchasing the eBook, I was impressed by the variety of exercises for both beginners and advanced trainees. And unlike most eBooks, Author Coach Eddie Lomax actually teaches you how to design your own training programs and Continue reading

The Shah Training Methodology revolves around Work Capacity. Work Capacity is defined as the general ability of the body to produce work of varying intensities within a given time frame. Work Capacity is an integral aspect of being an athlete. Basketball players need to be able to move fast from one end of the court to the other and make quick and agile plays. They need to repeat this task over and over again. A basketball player with poor Work Capacity will tire out quickly and will not be able to recover properly between intense plays.

Bodybuilding seems to be the primary choice of training methods for even the layman lifter. Someone just looking to put on a few pounds of muscle mass without ever desiring to be a full-fledged bodybuilder should not be training with the bodybuilding method. Training a particular muscle group, then resting it for three to four days due to muscle soreness does not fit into the rules of Work Capacity. A basketball player cannot train his jump shot one day, then work on his running another day, and finally his defense the last day. No, he needs each aspect of his training all at once in a game. If he says to the coach, “Coach I can’t run in the game today. I did that yesterday and I need to take 3 days off before I run again.”

Work should not be an end itself, but instead a means to an end. One of the reasons I despise the traditional 9 to 5 hours is that it forces you to be in one location all day long. During those 9 to 5 hours, you may have enough work, or you may not have enough work. Often times, work that can be performed in 3 hours, takes 5 hours, 8 hours, one week, or even months. Things are delayed, simply because the 9-5 paradigm gives us a skewed perception of time. There is a huge difference in productivity between one worker completing a task in eight hours and another worker completing the same task in two hours. Naturally, the work needs to be both effective and efficient.

Bodybuilders often train for two hours at a time in the gym. Total time and work are not taken into consideration. A bodybuilder will always say, “Oh, I spent 2 hours in the gym, or I performed 46 sets today.” Time and work should not be mutually exclusive. Instead, a bodybuilder should say, “I performed 46 sets in 2 hours.” How impressive is that? Well, this person is performing 1 set for every 2.6 minutes. Is this work effective? Perhaps, if you goal is to put on two inches on your arms curling a barbell for two hours seems practical. But is it efficient? No way. You can achieve the same results by performing pullups and dips at a high intensity for a few sets.

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.

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