Quality vs. Quantity

In last day, we learned that exercising for at least 30 minutes a day not only will it help you get rid of stubborn belly fat. It helps to improve confidence and your mobility.

Interval training is one way to help you to lose that belly fat and continues burning more calories even hours after your workout. However, some of us might be strapped for time or need to learn different ways to perform an exercise, especially if are limited on the equipment they use.

So, today let’s take a look at some of the suggestions.

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Scott: Some questions came in wanting to know more about the workout and the Turbulence Training thing….

How important are intervals when doing Craig’s six month bodyweight manual?

Craig: Well, that’s a good question, because that is a really tough manual. There’s a high volume of body-weight exercises in there. So, if someone is finding that they’re strapped for time, or they’re not recovering they should actually cut back on the interval training part in the program, or they can do the interval training on off days, or not do that part. It all depends upon their goals and their results.

I’ve done the workouts and they are some of the toughest ones I’ve ever put together. They’ll really leave you fatigued if you’re not ready to do all the training at once. Again, it’s probably one of my most advanced training programs, so if you need to cut back on something that’s fine.

Just a general note to any training program, you can always cut back on the number of sets or the number of intervals. You don’t have to do everything that is written down. If you only just did one quality set, you’ll get more than half of the results, maybe even 75 or 80 percent of the results than if you did three sets, depending on the workout.

So, again, if somebody is short on time or just can’t do all the exercises because they’re too sore or something after, cut back to one, and you’ll still get plenty of the benefits of training without the negative downside.

Scott: Speaking of bodyweight exercises somebody had a question. They’re just doing bodyweight workouts, and they wanted to know…

What else can you do to build strength besides pushups if I don’t have the luxury of a chin-up bar or a pull up bar?

Craig: You’re really actually going to have a very hard time building your back strength without any equipment or a bar. You simply can’t do any exercise that trains your upper back. Your lats will get trained by pushups and there’s a variety of pushups, decline, close grip, and close grip decline. You can even move to handstand push-ups if you’re really advanced.

However, you really won’t get a full body workout, unless you have access to a bar for pull up, chin-up, inverted rows. There’s simply no replacement, unless you have a dumbbell row. Get a dumbbell in there and do some rowing exercises, but then that would be a completely different question.

However, you just can’t train that stuff.

Scott: For me, I have his Jungle Gym, it just looks like a strap with handles that you can put in your doorway or around a tree outside or something like that. That’s good for bodyweight rows if you don’t have access to a gym to use a machine or something like that.

Craig: Great.

Scott: There’s so many varied things you can do, various grips, different hand positions, or width of your hand positions. The same thing with pushups, there’s so much variety you can do, and I think people don’t understand how many varieties of pushups you could do with just that one exercise without any equipment.

This person wants to know…

I would like to lose fat and not muscle. Is that possible? I’m currently about 157 pounds, 5’5” and I’m 46, and I want to lose 25 pounds. At my age, I can’t afford to lose any muscle.

So, it sounds like they want to lose fat, but they’re afraid that they’re going to lose muscle too. Is there any way to preserve the muscle and lose fat at the same time?

Craig: Oh, absolutely. My programs are built for that. As long as you’re doing resistance training at a correct intensity, that’s eight to 10 repetition intensity, there’s no reason why someone should lose muscle.

If you want to be super extra careful just make sure you’re getting, I would recommend 120 to 130 grams of protein. I don’t necessarily think you need all that, but it’s insurance. You’ll then for sure that you’re getting enough protein.

So, 120 to 130 grams of protein, plus resistance training, there should be no loss of muscle mass.

Just wanted to mention that we’re coming close to the end of this expert interview series. Please join me in part 6, where I give some good workout tips  for those busy active moms.