1 Obscure Trick to Make ANY Exercise 10x More Effective

by Mike Geary, Certified Nutrition Specialist, Certified Personal Trainer
Author of best-seller:  The Truth About Six Pack Abs

I've read about this very interesting Harvard University study about exercise multiple times in the past, but I was just recently reminded about this study again while reading the fascinating book called 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman.

Pay attention, because this actually shows a pretty powerful trick that you can use to literally make ANY workout or exercise program a LOT more effective and results producing.

According to the book 59 Seconds, here's how this study was carried out:

Researchers at Harvard University studied over 80 hotel room cleaning attendants from 7 different hotels.  The hotel room attendants naturally received a lot of exercise from their daily jobs, which included cleaning an average of 15 rooms per day at about 25 minutes per room.  This work involves a good deal of exercise in carrying things, scrubbing, lifting objects, vacuuming, and so on.

The researchers knew the hotel maids led an active lifestyle from their work, but also questioned whether most of the maids may not realize that their work was actually good for their health.  The researchers set out to study the effects on the hotel attendants of making them very aware of how beneficial the exercise they got while working was for their health, and to see if this increased the results that they actually received from the exercise.

Basically, the question was... Would telling them that their work was great exercise improve their health, lower their blood pressure, and help them to lose weight compared to the hotel attendants that didn't realize their work was in fact "exercise"?

The hotel attendants were split into 2 groups:

1. This group was informed about the benefits of exercise and told how many calories they were burning while doing their hotel cleaning work each day. They were specifically told how many calories activities such as changing sheets, vacumming, and scrubbing bathrooms were burning each hour.

The researchers also wanted this information to stick in their heads daily, so they gave the attendants a handout showing the quantities of calories they were burning doing each activity of their jobs.  They were also shown a poster daily that reinforced how many calories they were burning.

2.  The control group of hotel cleaning attendants was simply informed of the benefits of exercise, but were NOT told how many calories they were burning doing their work, and also were NOT told that their work actually constituted a good form of exercise.

The researchers studied the existing lifestyles of all of the participants in both groups as well as giving them various health tests, including weigh-ins.

The study was conducted for 4 weeks.  The researchers made sure that none of the participants had actually changed their exercise habits, smoking, or eating habits outside of work.  This assured that there was no external lifestyle factor that could have accounted for the results of the study.
In addition, the hotel managers assured that the workloads of both groups stayed the same throughout the entire experiment.

Here are the VERY interesting results:

It turned out that the group of hotel cleaning attendants that was informed daily about the calorie-burning effects of their normal work routines ended up losing a significant amount of weight, lowered their body mass index and waist-to-hip ratio, and decreased their blood pressure.
The control group of hotel attendants that was not told about the calories they burned while doing their work showed NONE of these improvements.

Wow... very interesting huh!

Remember that each of these groups received the SAME amount of exercise and did not alter their lifestyle, eating habits, drinking habits, smoking, or anything else.  The only thing that was different between the 2 groups was simply that the one group was constantly being reminded of how beneficial the exercise during their work was for their health and how many calories they were burning, and therefore their minds were busy believing in the benefits of it.

This actually doesn't surprise me... this is classic placebo effect at work here, and reinforces how powerful our brains are in relation to the results we get from exercise, food, supplements, etc.

How to use this info to burn more fat in your workouts, build more lean muscle, and improve your health more from exercise and nutrition

There's a good lesson in this study.  If you strongly believe in your mind that the workouts that you are doing are drastically improving your body, your results will increase dramatically from those workouts.

The trick I've used over the years is to really "get mental" during your workouts and believe strongly that the exercise you are doing is transforming your body into a lean chiseled machine. (This is assuming that you're actually doing legit workouts such as Truth About Abs routines and not just wasting time reading a magazine while pedaling away on a boring exercise bike or treadmill).

So, if you want to burn more fat, not only do you need to workout intensely (for your individual capabilities), but you also need to mentally visualize the results you're getting, the bodyfat you are burning, and really strongly believe in how powerful the workout routine that you are doing really is for your body.

Along the same lines, if your goal is to build more muscle, then you really need to strongly believe in your mind at how powerfully your workouts are helping you to build muscle.

And this can be applied to your food intake too!

Don't underestimate how powerful your mind really is... If you are eating healthy foods such as those detailed in my Truth About Abs manual, make sure that you are also actively thinking in your mind about how those foods are dramatically helping your body, making you stronger, making you leaner, improving your energy and health, and so on.

Don't ignore this... this will drastically improve your results if you actively think about how truly healthy the foods you are eating every day are and how they are changing your body.  This is assuming that you actually are eating truly healthy foods every day.

Another benefit of this "mental programming" is that it trains you to actually want to avoid junk foods, because you want to be able to think about how everything you eat is improving your body instead.

So there you go... an interesting study that shows how you can legitimately increase your results from your exercise and nutrition by just actively thinking about the benefits of both every day!

The Best Exercise Substitutions for Your Workout

By Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS
Author, Turbulence Training


The truth is that sometimes you just won't have the equipment, space, or strength to do some exercises in Turbulence Training.

Fortunately, there's GREAT news about that, which I realized last.
And the GREAT news is this:

Almost every single Turbulence Training exercise can be substituted by an equally amazing exercise from my repertoire.

So let's go through a huge list of exercise substitutions. This will be perfect for you to print out and keep with your Turbulence Training program or in your workout area.

Exercise Substitutions

1) To replace Squats, you can do:

1-leg hip extensions
Step-ups
Deep Step-ups
Split squats
Reverse lunges
Forward lunges
Bulgarian split squats (with back foot elevated on a bench)
Reaching lunges
1-leg deadlifts
1-leg squats (use bands or straps for assistance if necessary)
1-leg squats standing on a bench

By the way, if you are using dumbbells for squats or lunges and you find that the weights are too heavy to hold, you can switch to a barbell if you have access to it.

The only reason you don't see barbell exercises in the Turbulence Training programs are because most TT readers exercise at home with dumbbells.

2) To replace Deadlifts:

The only "direct replacement" is dumbbell squats.

Otherwise, just replace deadlifts with a super set pairing of any lower body exercise paired with a row.

For example:

Barbell lunge supersetted with a DumbBell row
Stability Ball Leg Curl super setted with Inverted Row

3) If you have sore knees and need to replace lunges:

First, see a doctor and have them diagnose the problem. Second, see a therapist and have them treat the issue. Third, see a trainer and have them assess where you need to work on flexibility and how you
can include some "knee-friendly" exercises in your workout program.

These exercises include:

Lying Hip Extensions (also known as Lying Hip Bridges)
1-leg Hip Extensions
Lying Hip Extensions with your feet on the ball
Stability Ball Leg Curls

4) To replace Bench Presses or Dumbbell Chest Presses (of any kind),
  you can do one of these:

Pushups
Close-grip pushups
Decline pushup
Elevated push-ups
Off-set push-ups
Push-ups with your feet on the ball
Push-ups with your hands on the ball
Push-ups with your feet on the ball and hands on the bench
Suspended strap push-ups
Spiderman push-ups
Spiderman climb push-ups
Pike push-ups
Dips
Decline close-grip spiderman push-ups

By the way, if you have dumbbells but no bench, you can replace flat dumbbell bench presses by lying on the floor. And you can replace incline dumbbell presses with standing 1-arm dumbbell shoulder presses.

5) To replace any kind of row, here are alternatives:

Dumbbell rows
Dumbbell rows with elbows out
Dumbbell chest supported rows
Barbell rows
Inverted rows
Underhand grip rows
Seated cable rows
Renegade Rows (with flat dumbbells or kettlebells)
Dumbbell rear deltoid raises
Rows with TRX or blast straps
Chin-ups (these are done with an underhand grip)
Eccentric chin-ups
Sternum chin-ups
V-grip chin-ups
Pull-ups (these are done with an overhand grip)
Eccentric pull-ups
Sternum pull-ups

And in place of pull-ups or chin-ups, you can do:

Dumbbell rows
Dumbbell pullovers
Underhand grip pulldowns (kneeling) - replaces chin-ups
Overhand grip pulldowns (kneeling) - replace pull-ups
Assisted chinups/pull-ups using machine

However, if you have absolutely no equipment (i.e. no dumbbells, no barbell, no cables, no straps, and no bar) then unfortunately there is no way to train your upper back. The best you can do is to add a
lot of prisoner squats, prisoner lunges, stick-ups, and WYT's to your bodyweight program.

6) To replace dips, you can do:

Any version of close-grip push-ups
Dumbbell floor presses
Dumbbell close-grip presses
Close-grip bench press

7) To replace dumbbell split squats, you can do:

1-leg lying hip extensions
Bulgarian split squats (use higher reps or the 1 & 1/4 rep method)
Split squats with your front foot elevated 4-6 inches
1-leg dead lifts
1-leg squats (holding straps or cables for assistance)
1-leg squats standing on the bench
Step-ups
Deep step-ups
Reaching lunges

(NOTE: For many exercises, including pushing and pulling too, you can play around with the 1&1/2 rep style - lowering to the bottom position, coming halfway back up, and then lowering again, and then
coming all the way back up.)


To your success,

Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS
Turbulence Training