The humble gym towel can actually be an extremely effective training tool!
When you get done putting these quick and easy methods to the test, you’ll never look at your towel the same way again.
The towel is your friend…
And to prove it to you, I’ve got 10 ways you can use your gym towel to get a great workout (not counting mopping up sweat, of course).
- Towel Chin-Ups
Throw a towel over the chin-up bar and grip the ends. Now pull yourself up! Gripping and holding your entire bodyweight up on a loose towel is GREAT for the grip and will activate a lot of muscle fibers in your lats because of the instability.
- Towel Calf Stretch
Lay on your back on the floor and loop your towel around the forefoot area of one of your shoes. Now pull HARD towards you, stretching the calf. This technique works extremely well because you can very easily adjust the tension of the stretch. Forget fancy stretch straps – just throw a towel over!
- Abdominal Sit-Ups
This is a GREAT abdominal exercise…roll up a towel, lay down on the floor and slide it under your lower back. Now do a sit-up. The rolled-up towel braces your lower back so that instead of using hip flexors and putting stress on the lower back, all the tension of the exercise goes directly onto your ABS.
Be sure your not pulling on your head – you can also make it easier by holding your arms across your chest or at your sides.
- Towel Bodyweight Tricep Extensions
Throw a towel over a railing or something else a few feet off the ground. Now hold onto the ends. Set your feet back a few feet. Now, keeping your body stiff, bend at the elbows ONLY then extend back up. The instability of the towel grip will set your triceps on fire!
These pics show the exercise done on a bar – just loop a towel over the bar and grip the ends. Move your feet closer to make the exercise easier.
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By Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS
www.BurnTheFat.com
If you’ve been doing the same nutrition, same calories, same cardio, same weight training and the same intensity for the entire past year with no changes, then you shouldn’t be suprised if you’ve continued to get the SAME results (very little).
If you do more of the same, you usually get more of the same.
Caloric intake, for example is not something you calculate once and then never pay attention to again. Calories have to be calculated and customized for each individual in the beginning and then adjusted continuously in “real time” during the course of a fat loss program, based on actual results.
Just because you start at 1800, for example, doesn’t mean your caloric intake should stay there. Calories may need to be increased or decreased depending on whether your goals, your body weight and your activity levels change and based on your weekly progress (or lack of).
Which brings me to another point. I am a huge fan of using progress charts. There is a saying in business management and sports coaching:
“What gets measured gets done.”
When you start “keeping score” and tracking performance right down to the numbers, it’s almost miraculous how this awareness of how you’re doing translates into improved results.
When you track your body composition results every week, if a week or two goes by with no results, then you don’t continue with more of what got you no results, you change some variable in your program immediately!
An old Turkish proverb that says,
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Learn the truth about fruit…is it the diabolical diet-killer it’s sometimes made out to be or is it just fruit and actually pretty good for you?!
The answer to the question of whether fruit can or will make you fat isn’t as simple as yes OR no…because the answer is yes AND no.
Sound confusing? It’s not so bad!
There have been studies done on fruit sugar (fructose) and how it’s metabolized in the body and liver, which I’ll get into in a bit, but I’m also going to talk about fruit from a practical standpoint.
First, here is why it WON’T make you fat…
Will Fruit Make You Fat?
Fruit is a fat-free (with rare exception, like avocados) and fairly low-calorie, high-fiber food. It’s going to be hard to eat ENOUGH fruit to result in an excess of calories, resulting in noticeable fat gain…hard, but not impossible.
You would have to look long and hard to find somebody who ate a lot of fruit and had gained a lot of fat because of all the fruit they ate. Fruit roll-ups, fruit juice (with 10% real juice), Fruity Pebbles and Froot Loops…maybe not so hard, though I do have to say high fructose corn syrup is NOT a fruit just because it has the word “fructose” in it, so that doesn’t count.
And I don’t know about you, but I have yet to hear of somebody sitting down in front of the television and not realizing they ate an entire bag of apples or saying their doctor told them they need to lay off the bananas!
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By Nick Nilsson
Looking to gain maximum muscle?
The stretch position of a muscle is the best place to start.
With proper use, you can not only activate more muscle fibers, you may even be able to SPLIT your muscle fibers, making more of them – that means faster gains, more easily!
When it comes to training, all exercises are NOT created equal. If you’re looking to gain mass, you know the squat is going to add a lot more muscle to your legs than a leg extension.
But did you know that focusing work on the greatest stretched position of a muscle can give you a similar advantage in muscle building?
Research has shown that placing high tension on muscles in their stretched position can have two extremely important effects on muscle building.
The first is greater activation of your muscle fibers – they fire in larger numbers, which is just what we need to build muscle. When you add tension to the muscle in the stretched position, you activate what is called the Myotatic Reflex (a.k.a. stretch reflex). It’s a reflex designed to protect the joints when heavy loads are placed on the muscles in the stretched position. To try and protect the joint, the body activates more muscle fibers to try and get that load out of the stretched position.
More fibers worked means more fibers growing!
The second important effect of stretch-position training, while being a potentially VERY powerful one, is still only a theoretical one. Because while no human studies have confirmed this effect, numerous animal studies have demonstrated it reliably, showing overall muscle size increases in the order of 300% (which is HUGE).
The effect is “hyperplasia,” which means muscle fiber splitting (compare it to “hypertrophy,” which means muscle fiber growth). When high tension is placed on the muscle in the stretched position, a single muscle fiber may actually split into TWO muscle fibers in response.
More fibers in the muscle means more overall potential growth! If you have more muscle fibers, it’s just plain easier to build muscle. Having more muscle fibers is most likely one of the reasons some people just build muscle faster than others.
So how do we train to maximize muscle growth from the stretched positions of muscles?
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If you are looking for a compact and powerful weight training tools to perform some strength workout at home, the Bowflex 552 SelectTech Dumbbells are the right exercise equipment to solve your weight training problem.
Adjust the dumbbell weight just by turning the dial
This innovative design pair of dumbbell combines 15 sets of weights into one, using a unique dial system; each dumbbell is adjustable from 5 to 52.5 pounds in 2.5-pound increments up to the first 25 pounds with the turn of a dial. The space-efficient and flexible weight training tools eliminate the need for multiple dumbbells to perform all your workout routines.
You can perform more than 30 strength training exercise with this flexible dumbbell, including shoulder exercises, chest exercises, abdominal exercises, back exercises, arm exercises and leg exercises.
Click here to find out more information for Bowflex 552 SelectTech Dumbbells.
By Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS
www.BurnTheFat.com
The secret to getting super lean – I’m talking about being RIPPED, not just “average body fat” – is all about mastering the art of “peaking.” Most people do not have a clue about what it takes to reach the type of low body fat levels that reveal ripped six-pack abs, muscle striations, vascularity and extreme muscular definition, so they go about it completely the wrong way.
Here’s a case in point: One of my newsletter subscribers recently sent me this question:
Tom, on your www.burnthefat.com website, you wrote:
‘Who better to model than bodybuilders and fitness competitors? No athletes in the world get as lean as quickly as bodybuilders and fitness competitors. The transformations they undergo in 12 weeks prior to competition would boggle your mind! Only ultra-endurance athletes come close in terms of low body fat levels, but endurance athletes like triathaletes and marathoners often get lean at the expense of chewing up all their muscle. Some of them are nothing but skin and bone.’
“There seems to be a contradiction unless I’m missing something. Why do bodybuilders and fitness competitors have to go through a 12 week ‘transformation’ prior to every event instead of staying ‘lean and mean’ all the time? If they practice the secrets exposed in your book, they should be staying in shape all the time instead of having to work at losing fat prior to every competitive event, correct?”
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If you are looking for the right exercise targeted to built bigger chest. This new book “The Best Chest Exercises You’ve Never Heard Of” written by Nick Nilsson is just what you are waiting for. Nick’s just released this book and is only charging $29.95 for the full 53-exercise book. (Note: special launch price is valid until Dec 18, after that price will go up to $49.95)
This is just DIRT CHEAP for the sheer volume of innovative exercises you’ll find in it. Exercise descriptions, pictures, even an entire video library that you’ll have full access to so you know exactly how to perform every exercise.
If you’ve got access to free weight and bodyweight and a few basic pieces of equipment, you’ll be able to use the VAST majority of these exercises.
These chest exercise will :
- Provide a new growth stimulus for your pecs, which will help you make gains without any more effort than you’re putting in right now on your current exercises and programs.
- Increase your strength in other conventional exercises. You could potentially add 30 pounds or more to your regular bench press simply by working in a few of the strength-and-connective tissue targeted exercises I’ve got in the book.
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