After 40 Years of Doing Cardio Exercise, Why Did We Add in High Intensity Training"?

The premise of high intensity exercise (also known as "surge training" or "interval training"): When you tax your muscles to the maximum, they tear themselves down and rebuild as larger muscles. High intensity exercises are considered a Fountain of Youth. In addition to building stronger muscles, this process removes all stored glucose in your muscles (since you work your muscle groups to “failure” or complete exhaustion), and this has been shown to increase glucose uptake by 23 percent after only four months (Body by Science, Doug McGuff, M.D., pg. 102). High intensity exercise also reverses aging, lowers cholesterol, speeds up your metabolism, optimizes cardiovascular health, improves flexibility, builds bone density and sheds fat. All in 12 just minutes a day!

Surge Training - The Easiest Way We Have Discovered to Do High Intensity Training

Surge training is a wonderful approach for working your muscles to exhaustion, and Maximized Living chiropractors recommend “surge training” in their MaxT3 12-minute exercise program, which we are currently doing. You pop the DVD in and simply follow along, doing exactly what you see them doing. On the video they have three people doing the exercises: a beginner, an intermediate and an advanced athlete. So you watch the individual which most corresponds to where you are at. Each of them does the exercises slightly differently with slightly different intensities. So you pick the intensity that is right for you. You can purchase the MaxT3 Training video series here. 

You are led through three 20-second surges of each exercise, interspersed with 20 seconds of rest (i.e. 2 minutes) for each of six muscle groups. This gives you 12 minutes of surge training per day, and they recommend doing the exercises 3 to 6 days a week. One day will be upper body, another day lower body, another day core, etc. I especially like the fact that there is a coach present on the video, and he is constantly encouraging you and pointing out how to do the exercise in perfect form. So I have just saved myself the expense and time of going to a gym, and hiring a coach. I love it.

All these exercises can be done with “resistance bands” which are inexpensive and easy to use at home. Click here to purchase a set of resistance bands online. This set comes with the necessary “door anchor attachment” which allows you to anchor your bands to a door by placing the strap through the open space between the door edge and door frame and then simply closing the door. This exercise approach is simple, easy, effective, and can be done in any room of your house.

You may also want to purchase an exercise ball, available at Kmart and similar stores. The chin up bar as shown in the MaxT3 video is not necessary equipment.

Additional Books, for Those Who Want to Explore High Intensity Training in Depth

Power of 10 by Adam Zickerman (order book here)

• A free video showing how to do the exercises is available here.
• Here is a free video with testimonies from those who did the exercises, including two identical twins (Kelly and Vanessa) who tried two kinds of exercises for 5 weeks and experienced the following results:

Kelly lost 15 pounds and 8 inches at 20 minutes per week of high intensity exercise

Venessa lost 4 pounds and 4 inches in 5 hours a week in typical cardio exercise

Summary: Kelly lost 4 times more weight and twice as many inches on a fraction of the exercise time. As I think about it, animals don’t jog, they sprint, and children don’t jog, they sprint, yet both grow tremendous muscles. So I am switching from jogging to high intensity exercise (i.e. we could call it “sprinting to exhaustion”).

Body by Science by Doug McGuff, M.D. (order book here)

Excellent free videos available here. (This book explains the science behind high intensity exercise.)