Turbulence Training Revisited

This month, I am following Craig Ballantyne’s Turbulence Training programme. This is a high-intensity training programme that allows you burn loads of fat, build tons of muscle and feel fantastic in 3 workouts per week, each lasting under 45 minutes. It’s in e-book form and comes with loads of workouts suitable for different fitness levels, different goals, for men and women, and so on. There are also equipment free workouts, in case you don’t belong to a gym, and lots of other support and information. And with so much content, the whole thing costs less than a meal out at a nice restaurant. And for us Brits, yet again, “GO STERLING!”, it’s practically for nothing. Click here for more information about TT. For more information on my workout, read on.

Each programme is 4 weeks long. I did the beginner workout back in July, and started on the intermediate workout. I was about half way through when hubby and I went on holiday and was finding it really tough – I was struggling, and not making major gains. For the last month, I’ve been doing a less intense workout but quite high volume exercise, focussing more on endurance than strength. I’m going to alternate strength and endurance periods from now. Anyhow, this month is strength.

Today was my first of 12 intermediate-level workouts over the next four weeks. There are two 2 alternating workouts, imaginatively called workout A and workout B. Each is made up of six exercises, grouped into 3 supersets, followed by 20 minutes of cardio intervals. Each superset is performed three times, with a minute’s rest between supersets.

For the uninitiated, a superset is where you do two exercises back to back, without a break, then rest before repeating. There are different reasons for doing this. For example you might use one of the exercises in a superset to pre-tire a muscle, then do the second exercise to take it to complete fatigue. But the TT supersets are created with a different goal. They are comprised of upper body/lower body exercises. This means that one body part rests while you work the other. This means that your workout takes less time overall. The other advantage of this is something called peripheral heart action (PHA). This means your heart has to work extra hard to shunt extra blood to the exercising muscles at opposite ends of your body. This makes your weight workout into a mini-cardio workout too, upping the calorie burn. You sweat a lot more than you’d imagine during a PHA workout!

Today was workout A:

Superset 1:

• Dumbell split squat, 3×8
• Dumbell incline press, 3×8

Superset 2:

• Stability ball leg curl, 3×15
• Push-up or kneeling push up, 3×15

Superset 3:

• Stability ball jack knife, 3×10
• Dumbell rear-delt raise, 3×10

And that’s it for the resistance portion. It doesn’t seem much, but the PHA nature means you’re working hard and see gains quickly. The whole lot took just 20 minutes. This was followed by 20 minutes interval training.

Interval workout A involves 5 minutes warm-up, 6 sets of 30 seconds hard (RPE 9) and 90 seconds easy (RPE 3) intervals, then 3 minutes cool down. Interestingly, having had around 6 weeks off from doing this very high intensity interval training, my hard intervals were at a much higher speed than I was using previously, my easy intervals were at a slightly higher speed, and my heart rate recovery rate was much faster. Last time around, I’d get up to around 80% of my maximum heart rate on the hard intervals, but my heart rate would stay elevated, often not falling much below around 65% on the easy sections, even on days when the easy sections were even longer than 90 seconds. Today, I was down to around 35% in the recovery period. This is amazing. It means I am much more cardiovascularly fit than I was. What a strong argument for periodisation (alternating workout periods with different goals) and cross training (mixing it up). I feel fantastic, and next time I do interval workout A, I will try and add an extra interval or two onto the length. I’m actually looking forward to it!

Anyhow, that’s all for today. Tomorrow I’ll write a bit about eating on the weight watchers’ core plan. ‘night all.