Category Archives: Muscle Gain

By Craig Ballantyne
Certified Turbulence Trainer
Turbulence Training Blog

I was recently in Chicago at a seminar doing the "road warrior" and I used the hotel gym to do Workout D from my current personal 4-week program.

My workout went like this:

Big Shoulder Warm-up (I have a video on my youtube channel showing what I do)

1A) DB 1-Arm Shoulder Press – 3×6
1B) Chin-up – 3×8-12 with a 4 second eccentric (lowering phase)

2A) Seated Row – 3×12
2B) DB Rear-Deltoid Raise – 3×15

This gives your upper back a pump, which is weird if you’ve never had one before.

3A) DB Triceps Extensions – 4×8
3B) Supersetted with stretching and more shoulder mobility exercises like stick-ups.

That was it. Nothing too crazy, because it was a hotel gym. I always plan my Workout D
to be light and "portable", because I never know where I’m going to be at the end of the
week, but I’m almost never in a gym with barbells.

Obviously that program focuses on building upper body muscle.

And building muscle has been a big topic on the TT Member’s forum lately, from both
men AND women.

I recently answered a member’s question and gave him 5 ways to tweak a traditional
Turbulence Training workout to get more muscle building from it.

Here’s what I said…

1. Stop doing interval training.

Listen, you’re not going to lose your fitness or cardiovascular health benefits if you stop
interval training for 4 weeks. It’s not a big deal.

If you want to build muscle, intervals will not be a big help.

So stop intervals, or at the very least cut the interval workouts in half, or even better,
just do 1 interval training session per week.

2. Add 200-300 calories to your post workout meal.

You know the drill here. Your muscles are hungry to replace the carbohydrates burned
during the training session, and your muscles need some – not 50grams – but some
protein – 20 grams is enough.

3. Add 200 calories to breakfast.

If you are coming off a low-calorie fat loss diet – let’s say 1800 calories – then adding
500 total (split between after your workout and at breakfast) will be a good place to start
your "muscle building while keeping fat off" efforts.

4. Keep off-day activity light. I recommend doing extra foam rolling, mobility moves,
light bodyweight training, stretching and just walking around. The great thing is that
you can split this up, so you don’t have to do it all in one session. You can do a morning
walk, some stretches before work, some shoulder mobility exercises at lunch or breaktime,
and a little bodyweight circuit before or after dinner. Again, check out my youtube
channel for over 200 exercise videos – lots of ideas at www.youtube.com/cbathletics

5. Finally, the extreme tweak – Do resistance training up to 4 days per week.

Stop all intervals. Switch to an A-B-Off-A-B-Off-Off routine, doing only resistance training.

Use TT2K4 for this, from the main Turbulence Training manual here:

=> Turbulence Training

The first thing to note about this program is that it is an Upper-Lower split.

So you can adapt it to a muscle building program by using it on an A-B-Off-A-B-Off-Off
type schedule and by removing the interval training.

BUT only follow this for 3 weeks because you would be doing the workouts 6 times each.

Also, if you do that, take OUT the shoulder press from one of the Workout B sessions to
cut back on shoulder training a little.

Here’s workout A from TT2K4

1A) DB Incline Press – 6 repetitions
No rest.
1B) DB Rear-Deltoid Raise – 10 repetitions
Rest 1 minute & repeat 2 more times for a total of 3 supersets.

2A) DB Row – 6 repetitions per side
No rest.
2B) DB Floor Press – 8 repetitions
Rest 1 minute & repeat 2 more times for a total of 3 supersets.

3A) DB Triceps Extension – 8 repetitions
No rest.
3B) DB Incline Curl – 8 repetitions
Rest 1 minute & repeat 2 more times for a total of 3 supersets.

Bam.

Get the complete Turbulence Training manual here:

=> Turbulence Training

Five simple tweaks to a proven workout system that will help you build muscle,

Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS
Certified Turbulence Trainer

PS – This would be a perfect program to use in the 11th TT Transformation Contest.