Lack of time is probably the number one excuse people have for not getting their workouts done.  With the busy schedules that most people have, that is understandable.  Especially if they are considering workouts that last 45 minutes, an hour or longer.

Interval training is most definitely the answer to this problem, since you can easily get a great workout in under 10 minutes.  My favorite flavor of intervals is  — no surprise, kettlebell training.  I have made good use of well planned kettlebell interval workouts this week.  Regardless of my schedule issues,  RKC is still my goal and my training needs to proceed.

Here’s what Friday’s workout looked like:

A quick 3 minute warm up and then right into focused chinup training.  These have always been tough for me and still are.  I’d like to blame it on my bad wrist but that’s just not it.  I’m working on it. Really really hard.  5 minutes

Clean and presses.  My 12kg bell was at the studio and I can’t press the 16kg (yet) so I used the 10kg for presses.  I wanted a tough, quick workout with the 10kg so I did 3 sets of amrap (as many reps as possible) with good form and without going to failure.  I just cleaned the bell once and continued with presses.  I managed 1 set at 15, 1 at 13 and 1 at 12 reps per side.  I had hoped to get 15 each set but was satisfied nonetheless — about 8 minutes total.

Next was the kettlebell intervals.  I had about 10 minutes available.  I decided to do intervals of 20 swings followed by about 10-15 seconds of rest.   Swinging the 16kg bell for that long is still tough for me.  After a few intervals, it’s not unusual for me to get nauseous. For this workout my plan was to complete the 10 minutes with good form and going as hard as I could without hitting that point.

It went well.  When I was done I was completely exhausted. Between the chinups and the presses I got a great upper body workout.  The kettlebell swings are certainly a great lower body workout.  The intervals pushed my conditioning farther and guaranteed me a nice “afterburn” effect.  Excellent!  And all in under 30 minutes.

Some days when I am really pressed for time I skip everything but the intervals.  Five or six minutes with a heavy kettlebell is plenty.

Since time is now ruled out for an excuse, here are a few more ideas.  Kind of .  .  .

I’ve decided I’m naming these work outs that Elise designed.  Today’s will be known as Beautiful.  It’s one with very  fluid movements, a sweet blend of cardio and strength.  Everything is unilateral – Kettlebell Swing, Swing Clean, Squat, Press.   I used the 12kg throughout this time.  I considered adding an extra set at the end, but I was too fatigued to do many more cleans and/or presses.  So instead I just did more swings.  I borrowed my friend, www.twitter.com/kravmascara ’s, idea and did one hand swings for :30 per side and then :30 rest.  It didn’t take too many rounds before I was toast.   Total workout time 22:23.  I burned 203 calories.  But we all know that the afterburn is what counts. 

In reading Rachel Cosgrove’s blog today, I saw a link to a great article in Women’s Health magazine.  Those of us who weight train regularly, either with free weights, kettlebells, sandbags or other equipment know that the benefits of doing so are numerous.  We don’t need to be sold.  However, it’s sometimes fun to relook those benefits to keep our own motivation high.  Plus we stay ready to freely spout these facts to unsuspecting listeners wherever we go!  Here is an excerpt from the article from Women’s Health, April 2009 (Italics added by me):

Pump Up, Slim Down

If you’ve blown off weight training for fear of bulking up, you’re missing out on the fastest fat-burning method known to woman

Lauren Aaronson

Tired of sweating all over every piece of cardio equipment at the gym and still getting zero love from the scale? You need more iron. Not in your diet—in your hands. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, a mere 21 percent of women strength train two or more times a week. What you don’t know: When you skip the weight room, you lose out on the ultimate flab melter. Those two sessions a week can reduce overall body fat by about 3 percentage points in just 10 weeks, even if you don’t cut a single calorie. That translates to as much as three inches total off your waist and hips. Even better, all that new muscle pays off in a long-term boost to your metabolism, which helps keep your body lean and sculpted. Suddenly, dumbbells sound like a smart idea. Need more convincing? Read on for more solid reasons why you should build flex time into your day.

Torch Calories 24/7
Though cardio burns more calories than strength training during those 30 sweaty minutes, pumping iron slashes more overall. A study in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that women who completed an hour-long strength-training workout burned an average of 100 more calories in the 24 hours afterward than they did when they hadn’t lifted weights. At three sessions a week, that’s 15,600 calories a year, or about four and a half pounds of fat—without having to move a muscle.

What’s more, increasing that afterburn is as easy as upping the weight on your bar. In a study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, women burned nearly twice as many calories in the two hours after their workout when they lifted 85 percent of their max load for eight reps than when they did more reps (15) at a lower weight (45 percent of their max).

There’s a longer-term benefit to all that lifting, too: Muscle accounts for about a third of the average woman’s weight, so it has a profound effect on her metabolism, says Kenneth Walsh, director of Boston University School of Medicine’s Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute. Specifically, that effect is to burn extra calories, because muscle, unlike fat, is metabolically active. In English: Muscle chews up calories even when you’re not in the gym. Replace 10 pounds of fat with 10 pounds of lean muscle and you’ll burn an additional 25 to 50 calories a day without even trying.

Target Your Trouble Spots
If you’ve ever tried to ditch the saddlebags and ended up a bra size smaller instead, you know that where you lose is as important as how much. As great as it might be to see the numbers on the scale go down, when you’re on a strict cardio-only program your victory is likely to be empty. A recent study at the University of Alabama at Birmingham compared dieters who lifted three times a week with those who did aerobic exercise for the same amount of time. Both groups ate the same number of calories, and both lost the same amount—26 pounds—but the lifters lost pure chub, while about 8 percent of the aerobicizers’ drop came from valuable muscle. Researchers have also found that lifting weights is better than cardio at whittling intra-abdominal fat—the Buddha-belly kind that’s associated with diseases from diabetes to cancer.

Just don’t rely exclusively on the scale to track your progress in the battle of the bulge. Because muscle is denser than fat, it squeezes the same amount of weight into less space. “Often, our clients’ scales won’t drop as fast, but they’ll fit into smaller jeans,” says Rachel Cosgrove, owner of Results Fitness in Santa Clarita, California. And it’s the number on the tag inside your bootcuts you want to get lower, right?

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Weight training women are in the minority.  Let’s change that!

Full article here:   http://www.womenshealthmag.com/weight-loss/weight-training-tips