Cardio Confessional

Apparently there is some type of mid-term election going on in the USA this week…

…but we also have the mid-term elections going on in our latest TT Transformation Contest!

Our top male and female entries from the Six Week TT Transformation Contest have been posted and you can vote (until Saturday) here:

=> http://www.transformationcontest.com/index_vote_1110.shtml

Congrats to our amazing success stories with record 6-week fat loss results!

Keep it up for the remaining 6 weeks. And we’ll get a chance to vote for the 12-week finalists later in December.

It is truly AMAZING how you can change your body in less than 6 weeks.

It truly is.

But of course, you won’t change your body with a bad diet while relying on the “cardio confessional” to burn it off.

After all, each one of those lil’ mini chocolate bars that you gave out for Halloween probably contains about 50 calories.

You’d have to jog for about 5 minutes at a slow cardio pace to burn that off.

And who are we kidding, NO ONE – not even me – eats just ONE of those little chocolate bar critters.

One of my friends posted on Facebook that he had 18 (!) of them by late Sunday evening.

Uh-oh.

That’s 900 calories…or about 90 minutes of slow “yogging”, as Will Ferrell called it in the cinematic classic, “Anchorman”.

Want more bad news?

According to Men’s Health magazine:

– 67 minutes of jump rope burns 920 calories (only Rocky would like this)
– 90 minutes of chopping wood burns 1000 calories
– 2 hours of backpacking burns the 1000 calories

And according to a random website, it would take a 200 pound guy over 70 minutes on the elliptical machine or 2 hours of hard
landscaping to burn 1000 calories.

Then again, does all that cardio “really” help fat loss?

If you climb on the “cardio confessional” on a Monday morning after Halloween, or Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or any weekend of excess, can you really beat the fat with cardio?

The answer, sadly, is no.

Actually, that’s not sad. That’s GREAT news.

You are FREE of the cardio confessional forever!

After all, our Transformation Contest winners don’t do endless cardio.

Plus, as I’ve mentioned before, research shows that regular cardio doesn’t really help with fat loss.

1) One study found that 300 hours of cardio per year helped men lose only 6 pounds (and women lost only 4 pounds). So that’s about 50 hours of cardio per pound of weight lost – at BEST!

(Reference: Obesity 15:1496-1512 (2007). Exercise Effect on Weight and Body Fat in Men and Women. Anne McTiernan*, et al.)

2) Another study found SOME folks start eating MORE when they start a cardio program. These folks end up gaining weight on aerobics.

(Reference: International Journal of Obesity 32: 177-184, 2008).

So if long, slow, boring cardio doesn’t work, what’s left for to burn fat?

The good news is that we have an answer:

Total body workouts and interval training.

One study showed interval training was better than cardio at burning belly fat (and cut the workout time in half).

Plus, yesterday I discovered another research study from the British Journal of Sports Medicine (2010: 44) that found interval training increases fat burning.

In the study, British scientists from the University of Birmingham had subjects do 6-weeks of interval training three times per week.

The subjects decreased their body fat with interval training and were able to burn more fat during exercise – plus they improved their “insulin sensitivity” – an important health measurement.

The researchers concluded:

“The results obtained for the first time provide evidence to suggest that interval training is also a time-efficient method to improve
whole-body fat oxidation, body composition and insulin sensitivity in young, sedentary males.”

Exactly.

Which is why you’ll use powerful fat burning interval training in the TT for Abs DVD program – and that’s why I recorded the interval
training component so we can workout TOGETHER through the magic of video.

Not only will you and I do every set and every rep together, but we’ll also do the intervals together.

And you can wear your free TT T-shirt while we train.

Here’s the link for the TT for Abs DVDs and to get your free t-shirt:

=> http://www.ttforabsdvds.com/Thanksgiving

(Giving thanks for your support and for interval training!)

TT is scientifically proven to help you fight fat,

Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS
www.ttforabsdvds.com