Breakthrough in fatloss and health....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 1-29-2013

Astoundingly, the research that pioneered this breakthrough was done 30 years ago.

It was done in hopes that elderly people with osteoporosis might then have a safe and effective way to build bone and muscle.

It was astonishingly successful!

They were able to do it without injury as far as I’ve heard; they got much stronger; and they did build more bone mass.

Since then, at least two outfits offer this method plus a gym dedicated to it and a personal trainer to help novices do it well enough to succeed at it:  The Perfect Workout & SuperSlow.

The Perfect Workout is the one that just came to our area which got my attention with their local announcement.

Once they got my email they sent me some of the background info.  I read something in that and decided if this method was PROVEN to work best, it was essential for my own fat loss program to try it immediately, which I’ve done.

A.  What this is method IS I put first here to make it clear.

B.  Then I cover what it does for you. (It delivers the best of the benefits of exercise times TEN!)

C. Then I have how it works to use their system and how you can do it at home.

A.  The summary of the key concept was and is this:

Research has found that THE most effective way to build muscle and strength is to do strength training where on each lift, you take 14 seconds to lift the weight and 14 seconds to lower it

AND you do as close to 5 repetitions as you can. This takes using a weight you could do 25 or 35 times at normal speed -- NOT your best single lift weight!

 The ideal is to do 4 and a half and need to fight before giving up on the 5^th one—or just barely get it lifted and have to fight that hard on the way down. 

When you can do 5 reliably, increase the weight slightly.  You may only be able to do 2 or 3 at first but do your best and you will eventually get to where you can do 5.

Toward the end of each set, it gets astonishingly hard for such a light weight.  But it’s doable because for each set, it only lasts a few minutes. 

(With the trainer if you don’t do it at home, they help you make the effort too.  So, you have real help and encouragement when you need it during the process.  That ensures even beginners who have little exercise background do well!)

Even better, you only need to do it once or twice a week because it is so effective.  In fact, once a week may be better because it’s so effective that it can take your body that long to recover and grow your muscle after each session.

The last section in this post has my tips for doing this at home.  I’ve discovered some helpful techniques.

But before I do anything else, here’s what happened when I tried it the first time.

I DID find it hard to do 5 repetitions for such a light weight.  In fact, on one exercise that I normally can do 25 to 28 of I found I can only do 3 or 4 using the 14 seconds each way system.

And each set of only 5 took double the time or more I was taking to do 25 repetitions before.

The results were astounding though!

The result you want is to feel what people experienced in it call “the pump” where your muscle that you exercised feels bigger and more noticeable and clearly very effectively exercised almost as soon as you are done. 

You want to avoid feeling as if you injured yourself or get extremely sore.

Wow!  The very first day I tried this, every single muscle I’d exercised felt good and very effectively exercised.  It literally felt TEN times or more as effective as what I had been doing.

B.  The benefits:

First it’s an unusually safe way to exercise if you do it exactly as it specifies -- and use no fast jerky motions when it gets hard. (Fast jerky efforts routinely cause injuries.)

You use a lighter weight and move it so slowly you cannot tear things that a snap start with a heavier weight all too often does do.

That means it’s perfect and safe for beginners. 

But it also, albeit using a much heavier weight, is just as effective for an advanced strength trainer or professional athlete who has been exercising for years.

1.  For fat loss, four things really help. 

This kind of strength training is an effective and relatively fast way to add muscle – and by using it,

a) You lose enough fat relatively quickly that you begin to lose inches and find your clothes fit you more loosely.  Once that goes on for a bit, you begin to LOOK noticeably different.

b)  You can KNOW you are making progress even on weeks where you failed to weigh less because you literally FEEL it happening every single time.

c) Best of all, you can lose fat without having to eat so much less!

That’s because every pound of muscle this causes you to gain burns about 3 times as many calories as the fat it then replaces AND after every one of these sessions you burn extra calories for HOURS after you are done as your body lifts your metabolism to do what it needs to do to recover!

By combining that with eating better for you food and that only, you can lose fat without having to have be too hungry or hungry too much of the time. 

And you gradually have MORE energy instead of less due to your fat loss program!

Those things ensure you WILL succeed at fat loss AND you can keep off the fat you lose!!

d)  Then there is a big extra bonus you get within the first few weeks.

If something about your food upgrades gets challenging or you are fighting cravings for harmful and fattening stuff you used to like, it does take some effort to do the right thing.

BUT once you do this system for a while, you KNOW that YOU can persist and do hard things because you experience yourself doing it routinely every single week!

That may not have been at all your experience before, but once you have done this for a couple of weeks or more, it will be!

(Our post next time is on successful ways to overcome cravings.)  This single thing, doing this kind of strength training, can double the effectiveness of all the other proven ways to do it!

2.  For health,

Exercise improves every single marker of heart health over time. 

Vigorous or intense exercise burns excess blood sugars like a furnace AND turns off insulin resistance.

Such exercise is MORE protective than drugs for both heart disease AND high blood pressure!

Vigorous or intense exercise improves circulation both directly -- and by doing those things we just listed, and that helps ensure your brain and kidneys and liver keep working properly.

AND, such exercise slows aging almost to a stop and can even reverse some aspects of it.

When you exercise older muscle cells well, they quickly switch and become similar to what they were when they were younger.  To do that they lengthen, repair or rebuild the telomeres in those cells.  Work at Stanford found vigorous exercise slowed aging and added years of healthy life to the people who do it.  So that suggests that this process may spill over to the rest of you also!

Secondly, aging is to a degree a build up of undone repairs and maintenance.  With near youthful levels of growth hormone those repairs get done!

And this method of strength training, produces a massive surge of growth hormone every single time.

Third, aging is to some degree a drop off in capacity to do things.  That in turn is often caused by a drop off in muscle strength and control.  This kind of exercise is proven to reverse that!

C.  But what if you don’t have one of these gyms near enough to you to go to once a week?

What if you cannot even begin to afford their fee for even once a week visits?

Or, what if you already are set up to work out at home and are experienced in it?

Super slow strength training CAN be done at home! 

I’ve been doing it myself for 3 weeks now.

I use a dumbbell one set each for each hand, first left hand then right hand so I virtually never stop exercising once I begin – and I also do bodyweight exercises like push ups, then pushups from my knees the very next set -- and half and full squats.

I do about half an hour first thing in the morning -- a time that I am able to virtually never miss entirely.

Here’s what I found helps me to do this style:

1.  I already knew that I count, even slowly, faster than once per second.  So to approximate 14 seconds each way, I count to 25 when lifting and count to 25 when lowering the weights.

2.  Then to avoid losing track of how many I’ve done. I use self talk at each part of each rep.

When I’ve just lifted the weight the first time I say to myself, “That’s one.” Then on the way down I say “Finishing one.”  Then for each time I repeat the process.  “That’s two” etc.

I’m still getting used to doing it after just 3 weeks and lose track sometimes anyway.  I’m confident though that I’ll begin to keep count better each time I do it however with this method.

3.  14 seconds working hard does NOT work well on one breath as normal repetitions do.  So I find simply breathing in and out at my normal rate is doable for most of each set.

That gets MUCH harder for the last really hard payoff repetitions.

Last night I found a way to overcome that and make my strength a bit greater at the same time!

My wife signed up at the Perfect Workout center that opened near us and her first session was last night.

So, I now know their solution to this. When the last one or two reps get hard, switch to the fast and deep panting that childbirth classes teach women to do in heavy labor.

You get much more oxygen when you need it that way!  That increases how much you can do and how hard you can work your muscle – and boosts the results you get!

Note that if you are a beginner, you can do one set of pushups followed by one set of pushups from the knees, followed up by one set of half squats.

No equipment needed!  You can even do this in your hotel or motel room to maintain when you are traveling.

This method is SO effective that will begin to give you some of these benefits even by starting with just those 3 exercises!