Tabata: The Most Diabolically Effective Training Ever Conceived By Man

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Just thumbed through the latest Muscle and Fitness magazine and was re-inspired about one of my favourite ways of training – the Tabata Interval Method. It’s been a while since I tried it, so now I’m back on and am once again forcefully reminded of what extreme muscle soreness is all about. If you’re stuck in a rut, this “kick in the groin” type of routine will definitely wake you up.

It’s really the title that caught my eye: 20/10: A Pain Odyssey. It’s not for the faint of heart, let me tell you. It can make a grown man cry, (not that I was doing so, harrumph). But you WILL endure a lot of pain if you push yourself.

Here’s a quote I love from their article:

“Tabata Interval training is so far out of the three-sets-of-ten-reps box, it doesn’t even speak the same language.“

So, as the author states, “your days of resting longer than actually lifting are history, if you try this routine. You will actually be doing the opposite and will lift for twice as long as you break.”

Therefore you’ll:

1. Do as many reps as possible for twenty seconds,
2. Rest for ten seconds
3. Repeat seven more times!
4. Move on to the next exercise

Simple right? Eight sets of “as many reps as you can get done,” followed with a brief ten second rest. But don’t forget, this isn’t “eight sets of eight.” Try “as many reps as you can get in during the twenty seconds, followed by ten seconds rest.

You will not be throwing up large poundages. Typically, you’ll be using “50%-75% of what you’d use for a typical set of 8-12 reps, depending on the exercise. The best options for the Tabata Method are exercises that use a large number of muscles. Use the “lowest rep number” of any of the eight sets as your measurement to compare workout to workout. If you go too heavy, that last set may be 2-3 reps. If you go too light, you might get around 15 reps or more.

And by the way, those ten seconds go by fast. Don’t even think about getting a drink, looking in the mirror, or talking to the cutie on the bike. Ten second is ten seconds! No cheating! Besides, if you do it right, six seconds should be used for grimacing in pain – wohoo!

So why should you do this workout? The Tabata program might be the single best “fat burning workout” that I know, not to mention the increase in VO₂max. It’s not long, but it keeps you sweating, breathing hard and teaches the mental focus needed to help reach your goals.

Let me tell you, after a week on this baby, you will know all about a new “alien” muscle language. It’s one of extreme lactic acid buildup, agonizing bouts of soreness, and days of uncomfortable movement due to sore muscles.

Besides burning off tons of bodyfat, what can this type of training do for you?

• Improve your cardio-vascular function (aerobic endurance)
• Improve your anaerobic endurance
• Improve your muscular endurance
• Make you strong and fit and look fantastic

You got it right! It increases both aerobic (endurance) capacity and anerobic (quick power) output – two things that don’t typically go hand in hand. How’s that for a training method – yeah baby, yeah!

I think this type of routine is extremely beneficial because it includes 2-4 exercises per bodypart, unlike traditional Tabata training, which is usually one exercise per major muscle group. Once finished eight sets of a given exercise, you will then rest 2-3 minutes before repeating the same painful journey into the next exercise.

I took this excellent workout from a blog called “Healthhabits“. This guy (a Personal Trainer from Toronto, Canada) has some great advice on this type of training. Well worth a read -  go check it out. Anyways, here it is:

Workout # 1

1. Vertical Push Movement
2. Horizontal Pull Movement
3. Quadriceps Dominant Movement
4. Core Stabilization – focus on Spinal Flexion & Extension
5. Vertical Push Movement – optional
6. Horizontal Pull Movement – optional
7. Quadriceps Dominant Movement – optional

• Feel free to re-arrange the order of Exercises 1, 2 and 3. It doesn’t really make a difference.
• Sets 5 to 7 are for advanced athletes only. Remember, intensity is the key to Tabata success. Don’t try and pace yourself in order to add another set. Go full out on each set. Believe me, 4 sets of full intensity Tabatas should be enough to have you soaking wet with sweat and bordering on nausea.

Workout # 2

1. Vertical Pull Movement
2. Horizontal Push Movement
3. Hamstrings/Glute Dominant Movement
4. Core Stabilization – focus on Rotation and Lateral Flexion
5. Vertical Pull Movement – optional
6. Horizontal Push Movement – optional
7. Hamstring/Glute Dominant Movement – optional

• Feel free to re-arrange the order of Exercises 1, 2 and 3. It doesn’t really make a difference.
• Sets 5 to 7 are for advanced athletes only. Remember, intensity is the key to Tabata success. Don’t try and pace yourself in order to add another set. Go full out on each set. Believe me, 4 sets of full intensity Tabatas should be enough to have you soaking wet with sweat and bordering on nausea.

Vertical Push Movement

• 1 Arm Overhead Press
• 1 Arm or 2 Arm Push Presses
• 1 Arm Grappler Presses
• Side Presses
• Thrusters – 1 Arm or 2

Horizontal Pull Movement

• 1 Arm Standing Cable Row or Band Row
• Body-weight Row – use an adjustable power rack or Smith machine. This allows you to modify the angle of pull and the percentage of body-weight. Also, change your grips from set to set – width, underhand, overhand
• 1 Arm or 2 Arm Seated Rows – I prefer the standing rows because of their high demand for stabilization, but the seated version is pretty good as well
• Avoid any bent-over movements – Your lower back will fail long before the rest of you

Quadriceps Dominant Movement

• Front Squats – Dumbbells or Barbell
• Body-weight or Weighted Vest Squats – 1 Leg or 2
• Overhead Squats – 1 Arm or 2, 1 Leg or 2
• Quad Dominant Lunges – Lunge forward onto the ball of your foot AND keep your step short and allow the knee to travel past your toes…I know, I know, everyone says not to lunge this way, but it really hits the quads. BTW, take a look at how far your knee travels past your toes as you climb a flight of stairs…ooooh scary stuff.
• Bench Step-Ups
• Bulgarian Lunge/Squat

Core Stabilization – focus on Spinal Flexion & Extension

• Standing Cable or Band Crunch
• The Ab Wheel
• Leg raises/Knee-Ups / Crunches (various) - I would skip these exercises – you will fatigue quickly and you will probably have to cheat to complete all 8 sets

Vertical Pull Movement

• Chin-Ups/Pull-Ups – Palms facing you, palms facing away, neutral grip, towel grip, offset grip , assisted
• Pulldowns – 1 Arm or 2, different grips, kneeling, seated, standing
• Hanging Snatch or Hanging Clean – 1 Arm or 2, dumbbell, barbell, kettlebell

Horizontal Push Movement

• Push-Ups – like the Body-weight Row, use a Smith machine to adjust angles and body-weight resistance. Also, adjust hand placement (width, overhand, underhand) from set to set. Trust me, switching grips will increase the number of reps you will be able to perform
• 1 Arm Standing Cable Press or Band Presses
• Stay away from any standard bench press type exercise. The lactic acid will hit way too soon. You will never get a good Tabata workout…trust me. The cable/band exercise is the best choice. Even the push-ups allow you to use your legs and core to help perform the lift. You need these extra muscles to take some of the load

Hamstring/Glute Dominant Movement

• 1 Leg Deadlifts
• Glute – Ham Raise
• Hip Extensions – Band or Body-weight
• Pull-throughs – Band or cable

Core Stabilization – focus on Rotation and Lateral Flexion

• Wood-chops - play around with different angles
• Barbell Russian Twist
• Tornado ball or
  
• Windshield Wipers – Bent Leg or Straight Leg

.

Pull-A-Burp – A Nasty Exercise With Great Results

Found this particularly evil exercise and wanted to share it with those who need some extra motivation with their workout routine. It’s called a pull-a-burp, which is a hybrid of a burpee and a pull-up, but the combination makes it a great exercise for both upper and lower body.

Here’s how to do it:

Do a normal push-up, then jump to your feet, squat nice and low and spring up to the bar and pull yourself up to your chin. Now drop down, and jump down to a push-up once again. Repeat the sequence ten times to feel totally wasted.

If you have trouble with this particular version, then try using a step, which will make your push-ups slightly easier. You can also jump less and pull more if you want to work mostly upper body, or jump higher for lower body.

Tabata Training: Efficient Fat Loss In Four Minutes?

Stuck in a training rut? Don’t despair! There’s a little known fitness system which I’ve been employing and it kicks some serious butt. It’s used as part of the CrossFit craze and it may just be a serious cardiovascular kickstart to whatever type of training you are currently using.

The upside: it will leave still you with most of your day to enjoy. The downside: there’s a price to pay. It’s four minutes of pure torture, anguish and misery. Picture yourself purely exhausted, with pools of sweat running down your body. And all that is achieved in four minutes. Skeptical? So was I, until I tried it.

So what’s this magical little workout, you ask? It’s called the Tabata Method, after the name of a Japanese researcher Izumi Tabata. He compared the effects of moderate-intensity endurance and high-intensity intermittent training on V02max and anaerobic capacity at the National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Tokyo, Japan. To everyone’s amazement, he discovered a way to increase both anaerobic and aerobic pathways at the same time. (Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise (1996) 28, 1327-1330).

It’s a world class training plan with a protocol that is unique among aerobic training programs for its intensity and brevity. It can help in many disciplines, and drops body fat quickly. However, don’t let the word simple fool you, as it is also incredibly difficult. Many will try it once and then drop it because they can’t stand thinking about doing it again.

So here it is: take one exercise and perform it in the following manner:

1) For twenty seconds, do as many repetitions as possible.

2) Rest for ten seconds

3) Repeat seven more times!

There you have it – four minutes of pure, unadulterated muscle torment and lactic acid burn. Don’t think of it as eight sets of eight, but rather doing as many reps as you can get in during your twenty second periods, followed by ten seconds of rest.

It works best with exercises which use a large number of muscles. The two best exercises for it are the front squat and the dumbbell thruster, because of the simple way the weight can be dropped and you can rest a second or so longer.

Pressing motions tire the muscles too much and failure will occur before ultimate rep counts. And an exercise like the deadlift will only lead to an injury, unless done strictly.

This is not body weight training, because it needs to stimulate the cardiovascular system to failure. But neither is it for those with an inflated ego, so ease up on using big weights. If you regularly squat 400 pounds or more, you’ll likely only hoist about 100 pounds for this routine.

Performing this set once or twice weekly is well worth it because it drops body fat very efficiently. In fact, “High-intensity exercise produces much more fat loss because metabolic adaptations resulting from HIIT may lead to a better lipid utilization in the postexercise state and thus contribute to a greater energy and lipid deficit. In plain English, compared to moderate-intensity endurance exercise, high- intensity intermittent exercise causes more calories and fat to be burned following the workout.” (Forget The Fat Burn Zone, High Intensity Aerobics Are Amazingly Effective – www.cbass.com)

It might be painful, but Tabata teaches you how to push past pain and achieve the tight mental focus needed to reach your fitness goals. Even if you only have a short work lunch hour, go ahead and squeeze this workout in. You won’t fall asleep at the job afterwards – guaranteed.

Note: “High-intensity exercise should not be attempted by individuals at risk for health problems or for obese people who are not used to exercise.”

The 300 Workout: Hype or Road to Awesome Muscle?

With all the post-show buzz about the movie “300” and the huge interest in the physical fitness undertaken by the cast, it’s no surprise that their training regimen is appearing all over the internet. Mark Twight, a former world record-holding professional mountain climber, was enlisted to train the actors and stuntmen with the goal of making them look as close as possible to Greek warrior of old. And after some research, along with watching some videos of these guys working out, it’s undeniable that they shed a lot of sweat and tears to get into such great shape.

The actors trained for four months prior to the movie being made, with grueling workouts lasting for 2-3 hours a day, five days per week. They were pushed to the limit, with tire flips, jumping, sprints, kettlebells, medicine balls, pull-ups, bear crawls, tuck sits, barbell thrusters and so on.

In other words, real, old school, brutal, full body movements through unstructured workouts designed to force results. And to make it all more competitive, the entire program hinged on a penalty-reward system tied to performance, with results posted daily for everyone else to see. No pressure at all.

300 program all the time?

The “300″ workout gets its name from the total number of repetitions performed through a set of different exercises. Many people believe that this workout should be done daily, something Twight rebuffs. In fact, he says it is done only as a finale – a kind of graduation test – after actors had weight lifted and trained brutally for months to prepare for it.

“300” is a one-time test, an invitation-only challenge undertaken by those deemed ready for it. By the end of our four-month project 17 people had done the workout. This constitutes about 50% of the cast and stunt crew. We supervised every test, evaluated each rep for quality and only counted those that achieved our standards for form and range of motion. Like many workouts “300” is not hard once you’ve done it but the apprehension built up ahead of it – something we encouraged – was enough to make some guys fear it to the degree that performance was compromised. This workout was a crucible that some passed through and others still have hanging over them,” said Twight.

Think about that statement. Even though it’s not supposed to be hard once done, only half the staff, having trained their butts off for four months, completed it. Here is what the 300 regimen looks like:

• 25 pull-ups
• 50 deadlifts at 135 pounds
• 50 push-ups
• 50 box jumps with a 24-inch box
• 50 “floor wipers” (a core and shoulders exercise at 135 pounds)
• 50 “clean and press” at 36 pounds kettlebell (a weight-lifting exercise)
• 25 more pull-ups

Add the above reps together and you will get a total of 300 reps, which you will have to do in less than 20 minutes.

Workout 100% responsible for those physiques?

Gerry Butler, who played Spartan King Leonidas, insisted in a “Men’s Health” video that his regular workout routine for the last year has been generally lacking. In other words, he implied that he was somewhat of a couch potato and out of shape. However, the veracity of that statement is doubtful.

The casting director for 300 interviewed hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals and I’m willing to believe he chose really fit, rather than average, untrained men. There is simply no training program on earth that can transform flabby arms and skinny chests into a Spartan physique in two months. And neither could these Clark Kent types withstand the brutal assault on their bodies.

Twight said himself that his Spartan workout is not for the faint-hearted, nor the out-of-shape. He knew that those who would get the best results are those who have trained before. So he whipped a cast which had a physical training background, and improved dramatically on their physiques. Anyone who fell off the bus over the weekend got smashed in the gym on Monday. So your average couch potato actor would never survive under the 300 training, even on the first day.

Here are some typical workouts at the Jones Gym website, used for this movie – http://www.gymjones.com/schedule.php.

Of course, training 90 minutes to two hours a day, five days a week, for four months, plus the same amount of time fight training led towards some overuse injuries. In an article written by Mark Twight himself, called “300 – The So Called Program,” recovery had to be stressed to make sure the men would last for the length of the project. “We had a massage therapist on-site every day and a kinesiologist visited twice per week to treat anyone ailing.”

Not satisfied with all that, Men’s Health Magazine quoted Butler as taking on extra sessions with a Venezuelan bodybuilder named Franco LiCastro in order to exaggerate the physique he was after. “I wanted to look really strong,” he said.

In other words, he wanted a bigger set of guns and chest than the 300 program afforded. No secret there. If you want muscle isolation and that bigger, fuller look, weight training is required.

Eating regimen

In addition to their exercise program, the actors also followed a strict diet to give them a rugged, lean look – said to be barely adequate to fuel effort and recovery. In other words, a diet to get the actors to look their best in the short term, but not one conducive to long term good health.

The 300 workout (with its inherent healthy, but restrictive diet) is not the Holy Grail to a better physique. While it may shock your system into new growth; in the end, it is nutrition which will determine the outcome of your hard work. You are what you eat, and you can test that theory by stuffing yourself with junk food for a week. There’s nothing more efficient at hampering good long term workout progress than an inadequate food supply.

So in conclusion, will this type of workout whip the average Joe into Spartan shape in eight weeks? Not a chance. Will it help the average Joe get into superb shape in due time? Absolutely, granted he takes the time to build up the strength and endurance to sustain the workouts. But from experience, I can tell you that all of the actors have gone back to a more balanced eating and workout schedule after making this movie.

In the short term, the workouts are a good example of the type of intensity it takes to get into really great shape, but in the long run, it’s unrealistic to maintain all out effort, all the time. No one has that type of discipline, because it leads to overtraining. The 300 workout was never designed for that purpose. Rather, it was meant as a short term, brutal training regime to get these actors into killer buff shape, helping the movie make more money – period.

However, the principles of the workouts can be intelligently employed in a scaled down version to jump start your physique. Men’s Health contributor Craig Ballantyne, a strength/conditioning coach in Toronto advocates dropping down to 150 total reps, or 4-6 exercises of 15-25 reps each.

For example, a guy with a moderate fitness background might try this routine to start:

• 15 bodyweight rows
• 25 bodyweight squats
• 15 pushups
• 50 jumping jacks
• 20 mountain climbers
• 10 close grip pushups
• 15 bodyweight rows

Source: http://www.menshealth.com

To advance, you can use other exercises with lighter weights more suited to you:

• 25x Bent Row
• 50x Deadlifts
• 50x DB Inc Chest Press
• 50x Bench Straddle Jumps
• 25x Standing Military Press
• 50x Ab Waves
• 25x Bent Row
• 25x Standing Military Press

Or try this one:

• 25x Pull Ups
• 50x Squats
• 50x Bench Press
• 50x Hanging Knees to Elbows Crunch
• 50x Squat Jumps
• 50x DB Snatches, each arm
• 25x Pull Ups

Source: http://integral-options.blogspot.com

**Remember to use weights suited to your strength and conditioning.

It’s true that most people should be working out harder than they currently are. But experience has shown me that only few have the consistency and drive to achieve long lasting results through properly exercising the body to make it consistently stronger and more functional. It’s not about getting serious for a week, or two, or even a month with a current flavour such as the 300 workout. Fitness and nutrition should be a lifelong dedication and passion to be of optimal use. Mix it up, keep it interesting, and stay in shape – without injury .