The Ultimate Training Journal
What is The Ultimate Training Journal all about?
We have gathered up lots of really cool, reliable, and tested exercises, lined them out by days, and given both trainers and clients the ability to use the book as an exercise journal. This will not only be a teach tool, and educational aide, but also valuable in recording which exercises a client has performed as they strive to reach their personal fitness goals. So what’s our goal with all of this…?

Losing fat and building muscle, plain and simple. One concept that many people seem to have a problem with is the idea that in order to keep fat off of your body you need to put on muscle. While at first glance this may seem counterproductive — gaining weight in order to lose weight — it's all about metabolism.

Metabolism can be summed up as all of the chemical reactions that take place within an organism. In terms of weight loss and fitness, metabolism basically means all of those calories that your body burns throughout the day. Your resting metabolic rate would be the amount of calories your body is burning when you are at rest — sleeping, napping, watching women's golf, etc. Our goal is to add lean tissue and in turn elevate our resting metabolic rate.
Muscle creates metabolism
So how do we do that?

As we add lean muscle to our bodies that muscle will require extra calories to survive. Imagine adding a bunch of plug-in space heaters into your apartment during the winter. As we keep adding heaters, the energy demands go up and our electric bill rises. More heaters, more heat. Similarly, as we keep adding lean muscle, our body must use more calories to operate that new muscle… Just like the space heaters. More muscle more calories burned.

Now let's take it one step further and consider the future. As we are adding lean muscle over the coming weeks and months your body will burn more and more at-rest calories. Let's look at our analogy of adding the heaters inside of our house. There is a certain point where you have enough heaters going to keep you from getting cold, and then you can set all of the heaters to their lowest setting and they will still keep your house warm, no matter how cold it is outside.

This is what we are trying to do. We want enough lean muscle on our bodies so that the fat we have lost can't come back. There is a tipping point when you are working out, where you have developed enough lean tissue (somewhere between 6 and 15 pounds) that the fat you have lost can't come back because you’re burning so many calories throughout the day. Maybe you are eating a 1500 cal. per day diet, but your body is burning 1,500 calories. Well, you’ve got yourself a nice balance.

A reasonable workout should burn between 500 and 1,000 calories in a given day (weight training plus cardio, CrossFit, extreme cardio, etc.). If you are working out 3 to 4 days a week — which you need to be — you are burning an extra 3000 to 4000 cal. per week. That would burn a pound of fat each week. But we want our metabolism to take over at some point, so realistically you are going to need about 15 pounds of new muscle (375 cal. per day of added metabolism) so that the fat you have lost stays gone.

Women have a hard time coming to terms that they are going to have to put on lean muscle. No one should be afraid of lean muscle; it doesn't take very much space. Ten (10) pounds of lean muscle is not much bigger than a cantaloupe — as far as how much space it takes up in your body (volume). Just 5 pounds of fat is roughly the size of an American football!

You’re right, that’s f’ing gross. But think of it like this: you could put on 10 pounds of muscle and if you lost just 3 pounds of fat you would not be any bigger. In fact, if you put on 10 pounds of muscle it would assist you in dropping several pant sizes, and reducing your body fat percentage dramatically.

Well… We're about to teach you how to do that!