Thursday, April 1st, 2010 at
3:39 pm

Doing exercise on the ab workouts ball can benefit anyone. In example, for Pilates beginners, moving into poses with the ball's support builds confidence and can help your muscles gradually stretch and strengthen as you improve your Pilates routine.
Ab workouts ball is the cool tool you can use for people recovering from injuries. Some injuries create muscular weaknesses that make it difficult or painful to do Pilates postures. A ball can ease you into a pose comfortably and with less risk for re-injury.
Work Those Abdomens
Abdominal work is only part of the story. You may be surprised to learn that even more essential to your core stability than a set of six-pack abs are tiny muscles that run along the spine and support the body's joints. Normally we associate a strong body with the large muscle groups.
But, what really improves overall body fitness is the strength of these tiny muscles. They're the ones that keep you from falling, wrenching a disk in your back, or spraining your ankle when you slip on a patch of ice.
Elevated Pushups for Pecs, Shoulders, Triceps, and Abs
Exercise: Place the front of your knees on the ab workouts ball and your hands flat on the floor (your whole body should be parallel to the floor). Look down at the floor and lower your face to within a few inches of it, then push back up to the starting position.
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Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at
12:38 pm
Everybody knows that more calories you burn equals more weight lost. Aside from healthy dieting, that means the high cardio exercises are your best choices to lose weight fast. Here is a list of the best exercises that may only take fifteen to thirty minutes of your day, but will give you the best fat burning for your time.
Biking
This can be done either way, with outdoors or a stationary bike. Some of the advantages of biking outdoors includes the weather, scenery, and the need for balance. Natural inclines can give some rest while hills give strong physical workouts. The change up also keeps all the muscles working. Biking is a great way to get into shape, and you can still move quickly. The stationary bike is just as good, and is a great way to burn a lot of calories in a short time inside. Some of the more advanced stationary bikes allow you to even program in hills and mountain climbing. Depending on what kind of resistance and speed you work out at, you can pretty easily burn 400-1,000 calories in just one hour.
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Aerobics
This is the best form of exercise for burning a lot of calories in a short time, and one form of aerobics, particularly step aerobics, is one of the most popular cardio exercises for women. This type of exercise targets the legs and butt, as well as burning calories giving you the best of both worlds. Done properly, step aerobics can burn over 400 calories in 30 minutes. It doesn’t get much better than that.
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Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at
4:42 pm
Editor's note: This article is intended to introduce the of 80-20 rule of Turbulence Training, a time-efficient research proven workouts created by Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS
What is Turbulence Training?
Turbulence training is my method of doing strength training and interval training in one workout. So that you get in and out of the gym whether it's your home gym or whether it's a commercial gym. You get your workout done in 45 minutes.
We start with a 5-minute bodyweight warm up and then we do strength training for 20 minutes, whether it's bodyweight training or dumbbells. Sometimes we use barbells but most people that I work with train at home so we just use dumbbells and bodyweight exercises - no fancy equipment needed.
Then we finish with 20 minutes of interval training. We are using the most efficient and effective training methods. The stuff that gets you the most results in the least amount of time. So we are not doing long, slow cardio sessions and we're not doing 5 or 6 day per week bodybuilding training programs.
It's like the old business principle - 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts - so why do endless amounts of cardio and redundant strength training exercises?
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Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at
4:14 pm
By: Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS
The great thing about strength training and intervals for fat burning is "efficiency". Because you are working harder, the signal to your body to change is stronger. You cut time when you increase intensity and you burn fat faster.
Now don't worry, I won't be asking you to do hill sprints tomorrow if you aren't exercising today. For a beginner, we just do some slightly faster than normal walking intervals. For intermediate fitness levels, we'll pick up the pace about 20% compared to their normal cardio levels, but again, the work periods are much shorter.
The key is, you must shift to a slightly higher intensity in order to cut time from your workout. But the workout also goes faster, and much more importantly, you will get more results and better fitness from these methods.
It's easy to do these workouts first thing in the AM, at lunch, or after the kids go to bed. Plus, you can get a great workout at home with only a bench, dumbbells, and an exercise ball. You don't need fancy machines or an expensive gym membership.
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