Power of 10: The Once-a-Week, Slow Motion Fitness Revolution

The Once–A–Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution.

Power of 10 seems to contradict nearly everything we're accustomed to hearing about exercise. Forget hours on the treadmill, and forget daily visits to the gym. This new program offers 20–minute workout sessions once or twice per week, with an alluring emphasis on rest and recovery on your days off. The principle behind Power of 10 is simple: by lifting weights in slow motion, making each rep last 20 seconds (10 seconds lifting and 10 seconds lowering) instead of the typical 7 seconds, you can maximise muscle transformation. The short workouts are so effective that your body will need days to recover and repair properly. Studies have shown that such routines can increase lean body mass, help burn calories, and prevent cardiovascular disease more efficiently than aerobic exercise alone. Fitness expert Adam Zickerman will present the science behind the growing movement, and back up his theories with recent results from such reputable sources as the American Heart Association.

Chapter One

Step Into the Exercise Future

I've put this question to hundreds of people before they begin training: "What would you call an exercise technology, so advanced it ...

• builds lean muscle up to 50 percent faster than other exercise
• supercharges your body to burn fat
• cuts the chance of painful injuries to almost zero
• builds cardio fitness without aerobic exercise
• is so efficient, it requires as little as 20 minutes, once a week?"

I then proclaim, "You wouldn't call it exercise, you'd call it FUTURE-CISE!" And they say, "Future-cise? That is the dumbest name I've ever heard ... But, is the rest true?"

Yes, it is, or you wouldn't be reading this book, and thousands of people wouldn't be learning to train this way. When you apply modern science to any endeavor - from spaceships to sports activity - you discover breakthroughs in the technology of doing things. Take skiing. Picabo Street's not doing 65 mph on old wooden, long boards with bear-trap bindings. Her Kevlar composite parabolic skis and titanium bindings have revolutionized what she can do on skis. Now, remember when exercise was two fat guys in those old movies throwing a medicine ball at each other's gut? Exercise science has undergone the same evolution. Twenty years ago, researchers began experimenting with weight training, and the result is the core technology of Power-of-10.

Weight Training is the Key to the Kingdom

I want to start by thanking America's top fitness experts and the authors of today's bestselling workout books. They've written hundreds of pages and made millions of people aware of a major theme of this book - which means I only have to cover it in a page and a half. The theme is that, after thirty years of being told by the establishment that fitness is a matter of endless aerobics sessions on a squeaking treadmill, America is not fit, not lean, not in shape, and not losing weight. The truth, the experts agree, is that the key to fitness and weight loss is resistance training with weights. And after devoting my whole career to fitness and health, I'll second that emotion. Weights are the shining path. The reason's really quite simple. Only resistance training with weights builds lean muscle mass. By comparison, aerobics builds virtually none. Only lean muscle mass can change the shape of your body to the trim, curvaceous, or muscular form you want. For women who are afraid of bulking up, lean muscle actually makes their body profile smaller because muscle is more compact.

25 Aerobic Workouts Per Month, While You Sleep

But here's the best part: lean muscle mass requires the burning of energy - that is, it has to burn calories just to sustain itself in your body. So the more lean muscle you have versus fat, the more calories you burn while you sit, while you relax, and while you sleep. A lot more. Three extra pounds of lean muscle burns about 10,000 extra calories a month, just sitting around! Add it up. Since aerobic exercise like jogging burns only about 100 calories per mile, and a typical aerobic workout burns 100 calories every 15 minutes, having 3 extra pounds of muscle burns as many calories as running 25 miles per week, or doing 25 aerobic workouts per month without leaving your couch! It's really amazing. Your metabolism is revved up by lean muscle to do this all by itself. You become a fatburning furnace. Scientists have also found that building lean muscle has superior cardiovascular benefits. By building muscle mass, the body has to grow new microvascular capillary networks to serve those muscles. This makes the heart increase its efficiency to service the expanded network. Since the heart is a muscle, increasing efficiency means getting stronger. And again, the heart exercises to service capillaries 24 hours a day not just when you're on a treadmill. Increasing fitness by weight training has also been shown to lower blood pressure, a good indicator that the heart becomes more efficient at delivering oxygen to your muscles as a direct result of weight-bearing exercise.

Aerobics Reality - What the Fitness Chains Won't Tell You

Nobody is saying you should quit aerobics altogether if it's something you like to do for fun or to relieve a little stress. I love basketball and bike riding. Just do it as a supplement to weight training, never as a substitute. Unlike weight training, which speeds your whole fat-burning metabolism, the moment you stop the treadmill, you stop burning the calories. Aerobics does little to change your body composition because it not only fails to burn much fat, build muscle mass, or boost your metabolism, it can even reduce muscle mass. And there's another side of the coin that experts are increasingly worried about. Repetitive stress injuries don't only come from pounding keyboards with your fingertips each day. What about pounding a road with the balls of your feet year after year, or putting hundreds of pounds of pressure on your knees with every pedal stroke, five thousand times a bike ride? Our joints and tendons were never designed for that. The fact is, physiologists are starting to warn that the current generation of compulsive cardio trainers may be setting themselves up for an epidemic of chronic joint and connective tissue injuries as they get older. A large percentage of regular joggers develop a serious joint or tissue injury over the course of 3 years. What's the point of keeping your muscles in shape while you're young, if you'll have to use a cane to get up the stairs in 10 years? The point is, we need exercise that wears out our muscles each workoutnot our joints and connective tissues.

If Weight Training is so Great, Why Power-of-10?

Because Power-of-10 is weight training in a remarkably efficient, more concentrated form. It's been shown to be safer, to work faster to change your body composition, and, best of all, you can do the entire program just once a week in about 20 minutes if you want. Regular weight training is great if you know you have time for an hour in the gym, 4 to 6 days per week. But if achieving your goal once a week in less than half an hour appeals to you - keep reading. You'll find that Power-of-10 is so advanced, it's FutureCise! Oops - I mean it's the Future of Exercise!

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Power of 10by Zickerman, Adam Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Copyright © 2002 John Cassidy.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-06-000880-6