The basic 411 is, stick with something long enough to improve or you never will.

I thought that was a great question and like all things fitness, it isn’t as complicated as a lot of people like to make it. It really is just moving.

To answer the question though, I would have to put technique first for the simple reason that proper technique is usually pain free, indicates if there is a structural problem when it can’t be done and lets you compare apples to apples.

What’s all that mean?

Well, lets take the squat. If your squat hurts your knees lets look at the form. Usually the knees will be shooting forward and there will be little glute activation and a whole lot of weight distribution over the toes. While there is a place for that sort of thing with hindu squats and sissy squats and stuff, the actual natural most efficient movement for squatting is a lot different. The weight over the heels, knees torqued out, shins more vertical. So if this person thought they couldn’t squat because they were too old and their knees hurt, maybe it’s just technique.

If the technique cannot be done correctly after proper instruction, then maybe the body isn’t working right. So not being able to squat right could be tight calves, or hamstring or weak jacked up external rotators. These are things that should be looked at before the person tries something explosive like sprinting and blows the ass out of their engines.

Lastly or at least the last reason I feel like talking about right now is comparison of apples to apples. In other words, when the technique stays the same always there is a metric to measure improvement or lack thereof. If your form always changes especially under intensity you never know exactly where you are capacity wise. One week you half squat the next week it’s ass to grass squats. You can’t compare those two exercise numbers on time to completion of reps or weight used because of stroke distance (that’s what she said.)

Having said that, if you go hard with intensity, you will still see results if you don’t explode into a pink mist before you reach your goals.

I’ve included exercise instruction videos with the Commando Workout to make sure everything is spot on so all you have to worry about is getting in a good workout.

And then once you feel fairly confident with that sort of resistance and that level, go all the way down to the floor, and just keep trying to follow that line of the forearms all the way out forward, touch your head, and push back and squeeze the shoulders. And it doesn’t take too many of them for your shoulders to really burn. Now from the front, and touch and push back.

Bodyweight Shoulder Exercises

I’ve done videos for all the bodyparts and put them in a complete workout that includes all your eating and organization tips to help women lose weight and look great right here: Busy Womens Weight Loss Workout Guide It’s pretty awesome.

If you go really low you can round the lower back, but not if you have weight on there. If you can’t get down low with that stance go wider, and just make sure that your knees and your toes follow the same path. That’ll help you get a little bit lower. And when you come up to the top make sure that you push your hips through all the way, don’t stay bent over once you get off the box or holding onto the sink or counter or whatever.

By the way if you like this stuff you can download the full program for kindle on Amazon.com for $2.99 here: Commando Bodyweight Training

So, a little harder now, you don’t have the box or anything and you sit up shoulder-width and you just get your thighs down to parallel, which means just even with the ground there, that’s a good place. Now you can go even lower than that, but that’s a little bit more than we are going to cover here. You can have your hands out or across; it just depends on what’s comfortable for you. The hands out lets you squat faster if you’re going for speed and you really want to get some cardio going. But don’t let your knees go way out in front of your toes. You want to sit back first, instead of descending straight down and having your knees shoot forward. So I’m reaching my bum back, and that really protects the knees, and gets all your good flexibility going. And you can keep going narrower and narrower as you get more flexible. When your feet are together and you’re doing these, then you know you’re ready for another version.

So a little bit harder now, we’re going to take away one of the legs, which essentially kind of doubles the resistance. So stepping back lunges is a little bit more friendly on the knees, and it really works your butt. You can do them forward too if they’re you’re favorite, or you can do them walking. But see how there’s a 90 degree angle at the front knee? That’s important. All the principles of the squat apply to the lunge.
Now once you are very comfortable with these, then you’re just going to speed them up a little bit, and you can jump. When you first start you can have your feet meet in the middle and then jump forward and jump back. This is great for extra cardio while hitting the legs like in the commando cardio program. Here I’m just skipping that middle step and just replacing feet. So I could just go right to standing and jump down, but here I’m just going fast.

And then when you can do that, now the king, the king of all squatting exercises, the one-legged squat which is often called a pistol. And this takes a lot of control and flexibility. And to get down in that position you have to have a flexible lower back, and you need to have a lot of things working for you, but this is there for you when you want it and if you want it. You can also go through all the steps of working with a box or the doorknobs to keep you from falling back when you first go to this version, and that’s awesome.

First, let me say THANK YOU.

I really appreciate all the hard work and how everyone has stuck to it and supported the new location.

The cats pretty much out of the bag now so here is how it’s going to roll out from here on out with Commando Fitness.

There is no more indoor boot camp as of the 30th of this month.

We are outside now at the Glenmore reservoir twice a week. You can see the map location here:
http://commandobootcampcalgary.com/location/

The class schedule is here: http://commandobootcampcalgary.com/schedule/

Mondays and Thursdays 5:30 PM- 6:30 plus some stretch time if you stick around.

Anyone that was on a monthly membership I have canceled it for you. If you would like to join in on the outdoor boot camps that would be awesome and you can sign up on the site here for the next outdoor session starting

Monday June 4 2012 @ 5:30PM:

I’m really looking forward to getting back outside and doing the old school training we used to do. It’s going to be awesome.

If you have any other questions, just fire away and I’d be happy to answer them for you.

Ray Burton

P.S. If you have a friend that you think would be interested in what we do, please forward this on to them. As well, the new face book page is https://www.facebook.com/RayBurtonsPage

CHEERS!!!!

Alright, let’s do some pushing exercises, I usually start my women off on the wall just in case you have sore shoulders. Put your hand in line with your lower chest line. Now measure up off of the wall by laying again the wall first, then putting your hands by your lower chest. This makes sure your upper arms are at the right angle. Now, if your feet are close to the wall you’re gonna find the resistance relatively light. So you might need this if you have sore shoulders, or something’s going wrong there, even your wrists and whatnot. As you feel confident you can put your feet back farther, but the relationship between the hand position and the lower chest level stays the same, but now the resistance has increased.

Then comes some more challenging stuff. You’re gonna go off of the wall now and onto the floor. If you have something in between, like a countertop, you can always use that too; counter top, chairs, things like that, just to decrease the angle a little bit. Now lie on the floor, and again measure up your hands just off your lower chest line. Contract your abs, and then push up. Don’t dip your head, keep your head up. That way when you touch your chest you’ll know you reached the bottom, as opposed to always having this sort of ambiguity of if you’re doing a proper rep.

Now, when you “worm up”, that means leaving your belly on there last; that’s not very good. You’re gonna “errrrrrrrr”, worm your way up, and then push back for a rest. Don’t do that. Keep forward, keep your stomach tight. Keep your hands back by your chest, don’t bring your elbows up by your ears because that’ll go right into the tendon area and that’s hard on the shoulders too.

So once you’re comfortable with doing that correctly, you can move on to the full pushups. Measure up the same way, hands on the lower chest line. Squeeze your abs, dig your toes in, and then push up. Sometimes I like to put a tennis ball right underneath the sternum, and that will let you know that you’re keeping on target as you descend.

Also here I’m just showing you the front version, but I’m still on my knees. So you can see how the upper arm kind of comes back in an arrowhead, not like a T. And there’s the full version from the front view. Everything stays tight.

Now once you got those other ones, you’re ready for something a little bit more challenging. So you put almost all, like 80% of the weight, all on one arm. And of course you can slowly build into these, so you just shift back and forth and back and forth, and the farther out your arm goes the more challenging it becomes. Awesome.

If you ‘d liked this article you’ll love this. “How To Workout At Home To Lose Weight And Look Great For Busy Women”

Just press play and enjoy, I don’t need to say anything.

I have written this with the mothers I have trained in mind so if you are not a mom, then you will find this a little off topic in my choice of words but the principles are the same.

Since I’ll be showing you how to do this, I’m operating under the assumption that you are here because, well, you want to fit in your clothes again and feel better about how you look. If you want to feel good in your clothes, the ones that you’re wearing all the time, then losing the extra pounds is going to be the first step.

You also want to tighten and tone your whole body including those trouble spots like stomachs and hips. And this is something that has to work even with your busy schedules and life’s circumstances.

Now, as a busy woman, I know you’re pressed for time so you need to lose weight in as fast and efficient a way as possible that works for your life. You need the guess work taken out and you want an easy to follow step-by-step plan that delivers results quickly and you want to feel more confident, attractive and sexy but not have to spend countless hours doing shopping, cooking and long, boring workout. The bottom line is you need your groove back. Over and over, women tell me they feel like they’ve lost control and that they’re playing second fiddle. You need time to spend on changing yourself to the person you know you can be while at the same time pursuing all of your responsibilities of being a mother.

So let’s talk about Bodyweight Training. When the main tool for losing your weight is your own body, your gears is always going to be available. The gym is always open and you never need to worry about spending a dime on gym memberships. Training only using your bodyweight and things you find around you means that you can change the challenge level of the exercise by changing body angles. For example, doing pushups against the kitchen counter is easier than on the floor. And I’ll be showing you all that in a little video in the Bonus Download area of the Busy Moms Weight Loss Guide. It’s going to have lots of variety in everything we do here and it’s going to come by altering [the] bridge, the amounts of limbs and time under tension to increase challenge. So, for example, one-arm pushups would feel twice as hard as using two arms to do your pushups. And time under tension, like I just mentioned, is just changing how long it takes to do the movement. So taking a minute to do one squat will burn your muscles a lot more than just doing a quick up-down. This truly is the way to go because it can be done anywhere, anytime. It’s effective and it’s free. I’ve trained soldiers in Bosnia and women in the basement.

With Bodyweight Training wherever you are your gym is with you. This overcomes the obstacles of traveling to the gym, being judged by people when you work out and feeling awkward when you first get started. It also helps prevent injury in everyday activities like picking up a baby and things like that. Because you’re using your bodyweight, your small muscle groups in the joint areas become stronger which they don’t by only working machines on the gym.

Bodyweight training has benefits that machine training doesn’t. Using gym machines doesn’t transfer the real world capabilities and does you the service by preventing you maximum calorie burns. The stabilization of the machines do for you prevents the development of small stabilizer muscles and takes calorie burning work away from you.

If this sounds like something you could do and use, then you’ll want to check out The Busy Moms Weight Loss Guide

Have an awesome day,
Ray

If you want to stay reasonably lean while gaining muscle then start at 15 calories per pound of bodyweight + 300 calories/day for a week and adjust up by same amount after 7 days if more weight is needed or no weight gain is noted. For a 170 pound guy that is 170 X 15= 2550 calories plus the 300 for weight gain = 2850 calories per day.

If you want to gain as much muscle as you can while gaining AS LITTLE extra fat as possible then you need to follow a tighter equation like what I’m about to explain:

Find out how many calories per day it takes for you keep your current bodyweight without gaining or losing weight.

To do this we need to roughly figure out:

1. Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) – The amount of calories your body burns maintaining bodyweight without exercise.
2. Daily work calories (job) – The amount of calories your job or daily life would burn
3. Then add exercise – The amount of calories your daily exercise burns

Calculating Your RMR

RMR = 370 + (22 x lean weight in kg)

To get from pounds to kg simply divide pounds by 2.2.

You’ll also need know your body fat percentage. A cheap pair of callipers or a bodyfat tester from Walmart works well here. If you have 15% body fat at 170 lbs then you have 25.5 pounds of pure fat and 144.5 lbs, (divided by 2.2 to get KG) 65.68KG is your lean weight.

The Daily Activity Multiplication Factor

Since a desk jockey doesn’t burn as many calories as a Totem lumber jockey, you need to take into account how many calories your job eats up on a daily basis.

Light work like an office job – multiply your RMR by 1.5

Moderate work (you move around a lot but not any heavy labour) – multiply your RMR by 1.7

Heavy work (you lift, hustle, move stuff) – multiply your RMR by 1.9

Calculating Calories Burned From Exercise

Weight training on average burns between 270-450 calories per hour and of course that depends on volume, intensity and your bodyweight.

Adding It All Up

A person weighs 170 lbs with 15% body fat.

This means they carry 24 lbs of fat.

170 – 25.5 = 144.5 lbs lean weight

144.5 / 2.2 = 65.68 Kg

His resting metabolic rate = 370 + (22 x 65.68) = 1814.96

He works an office job…..

1814.96 x 1.5 = 2557.32 to maintain bodyweight

He also does weight training 3 days a week for 60 minutes at a time which burns 300 calories. His Daily Calorie Expenditure on training days is:

2557.32 + 300 = 2857.32 calories

Putting it all together, this guy burns 2857.32 per day on workout days (3) and 2557.32 on non workout days which is 4 days a week. Make up the caloric difference you need on workout days with an extra post workout meal or shake that equals roughly 300 calories.

Then add in 200-300 calories on each day, for every day of the 7 day period in a week, check weight and adjust up if no weight gain is noted or more is wanted.

Now having said that, I never personally counted a single calorie when I was trying to put on all my weight. I only started using these calculations once I thought I needed to be “more technical” because I was a trainer… and it does work. I just ate until I was stuffed at 3 meals a day and drank a litre of milk in-between those meals. With this eating to gain weight and my low volume muscle building workout, I put on 50 pounds and and dated the prettiest girl you can imagine on the track and field team.

This is pretty much my go to book when it comes to getting more flexible. If you’d like to check it out and read more user reviews on it, you can check out Pavel Tsatsouline Relax Into Stretch on Amazon.com