Is This the World’s Easiest Muscle Builder? | Diet and Exercise | Real Life Fitness | PhitZone

Can building muscle really be this easy?

Guest post by Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS

Don't forget to train while traveling

(You know that I’m all about training for Real Life Fitness. Craig’s Turbulence Training system is exactly that. Here Craig explains how you can tweak TT to build bigger muscle – Todd)

I was recently in Chicago at a seminar doing the “road warrior” and I used the hotel gym to do Workout D from my current personal 4-week program.

My workout went like this:

Big Shoulder Warm-up (I have a video on my youtube channel showing what I do)

1A) DB 1-Arm Shoulder Press – 3×6

1B) Chin-up – 3×8-12 with a 4 second eccentric (lowering phase)

2A) Seated Row – 3×12

2B) DB Rear-Deltoid Raise – 3×15

This gives your upper back a pump, which is weird if you’ve never had one before.

3A) DB Triceps Extensions – 4×8

3B) Supersetted with stretching and more shoulder mobility exercises like stick-ups.

That was it. Nothing too crazy, because it was a hotel gym. I always plan my Workout D to be light and “portable”, because I never know where I’m going to be at the end of the week, but I’m almost never in a gym with barbells.

Obviously that program focuses on building upper body muscle.

And building muscle has been a big topic on the TT Member’s forum lately, from both men AND women.

I recently answered a member’s question and gave him 5 ways to tweak a traditional Turbulence Training workout to get more muscle building from it.

Here’s what I said…

1. Stop doing interval training.

Listen, you’re not going to lose your fitness or cardiovascular health benefits if you stop interval training for 4 weeks. It’s not a big deal.

If you want to build muscle, intervals will not be a big help.

So stop intervals, or at the very least cut the interval workouts in half, or even better, just do 1 interval training session per week.

2. Add 200-300 calories to your post workout meal.

You know the drill here. Your muscles are hungry to replace the carbohydrates burned during the training session, and your muscles need some – not 50grams – but some protein – 20 grams is enough.

Typically you want to consume your post workout drink within 20 minutes of finishing your workout. In addition to the 20 grams of protein, it should also contain twice as many carbs to immediately replenish your glucose.

3. Add 200 calories to breakfast.

If you are coming off a low-calorie fat loss diet – let’s say 1800 calories – then adding 500 total (split between after your workout and at breakfast) will be a good place to start your “muscle building while keeping fat off” efforts.

4. Keep off-day activity light. I recommend doing extra foam rolling, mobility moves, light bodyweight training, stretching and just walking around. The great thing is that you can split this up, so you don’t have to do it all in one session. You can do a morning walk, some stretches before work, some shoulder mobility exercises at lunch or breaktime,

and a little bodyweight circuit before or after dinner. Again, check out my youtube channel for over 200 exercise videos.

5. Finally, the extreme tweak – Do resistance training up to 4 days per week.

Stop all intervals. Switch to an A-B-Off-A-B-Off-Off routine, doing only resistance training.

• Use TT2K4 for this, from the main Turbulence Training manual.

The first thing to note about this program is that it is an Upper-Lower split.

So you can adapt it to a muscle building program by using it on an A-B-Off-A-B-Off-Off type schedule and by removing the interval training. Keep in mind that a good stack of muscle building supplements always goes well with a bulking routine like this.

Only follow this for 3 weeks because you would be doing the workouts 6 times each.

Also, if you do that, take OUT the shoulder press from one of the Workout B sessions to cut back on shoulder training a little.

Here’s workout A from TT2K4

1A) DB Incline Press – 6 repetitions

No rest.

1B) DB Rear-Deltoid Raise – 10 repetitions

Rest 1 minute & repeat 2 more times for a total of 3 supersets.

2A) DB Row – 6 repetitions per side

No rest.

2B) DB Floor Press – 8 repetitions

Rest 1 minute & repeat 2 more times for a total of 3 supersets.

3A) DB Triceps Extension – 8 repetitions

No rest.

3B) DB Incline Curl – 8 repetitions

Rest 1 minute & repeat 2 more times for a total of 3 supersets.

Bam!

• Get the complete Turbulence Training manual here.

Five simple tweaks to a proven workout system that will help you build muscle,

Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS

Certified Turbulence Trainer

PS – This would be a perfect program to use in the 11th TT Transformation Contest.

Caveat – This blog post contains affiliate links. Proceed with caution!

Photo: Hans Thoursie