I interviewed Craig Ballantyne this week for The Elite Body Expert Series (if you haven’t signed up yet, click here) and got the chance to ask him what the main idea and philosophy is behind Turbulence Training, and here is what he had to say:

Craig Ballantyne, creator of Turbulence Training: “I came up with this in the late 90s.  I was finishing graduate school, and  was doing a lot of research in the cardiovascular area.  We were actually looking at . . . in my Master’s degree study, we were looking at what happens to power and performance in young men when they do a lot of endurance training.  So, we expected to see a decrease in their power and performance.

So I was taking a look at a lot of cardiovascular research; a lot of internal training research; this in addition to me working with a lot of athletes and in addition to me working with people to lose body fat.  At the time, I was training a lot of athletes with interval training.  I’ve been using this for quite a long time now for performance, and, you know, we noticed that some of the research is also showing that fat loss would be increased by the interval training.  It’s really come out in a lot of recent studies.  Well, not a lot of recent studies, but a few recent studies in the past couple of year, so we were a little bit ahead of the curve.

When I was doing all that studying, you know, that fun lab work, I was really, really busy.  I mean I was in there 7:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. some nights where I just, you know, running this blood through these fancy schmancy machines and, you know, this was in the hospital at my university.  So I’m halfway across campus to the gym, and I didn’t want to not work out during this time.

I had about 45 minutes while this one what’s called a gamma counter; so we’re talking about radioactive isotopes going on counting; so, it had 45 minutes for this machine to do its thing on some blood work that I had put together.  I had time to zip over to the gym, do my work out and get back.  That’s all the time I had for it, and, you know, I’ve been body building since I was 16; then moved into a bit more – I wouldn’t say power lifting, but more like athlete strength training type stuff – my own personal work outs.

Again, with the athletes I was working with, I basically I just put it all together.  I like to use the phrase, “I put all this information together in my mental blender” and came up with what I call Turbulence Training which was simply the supersets that I stole from the body building world combined with the interval training which I stole from the athletic world and together if you take a look at . . . if somebody; a body builder and athlete used that type of training, they would be very lean, very fit, very Men’s Health/Women’s Health type body.

That was in 1999 I was doing that.  In 2000, I started working with Men’s Health, so I kept getting more and more into the fast workout – the dumbbell – the stuff you can do at home in your basement sort of thing, not have to go to a fancy gym.  Then over the years, it’s evolved into a lot more body weight training as well, because that’s just been what people have wanted.

That’s the evolution of it.  The philosophy behind it is simply to work the way you were used to and work less as frequently your sets – well, fewer repetitions per set, generally fewer exercises than the body building stuff I grew up with; and, obviously, cutting back on the cardio volume and just doing interval training.  It’s an increased quality of training, decreased quantity of training.

Our whole purpose is to put the body into what I call turbulence.  That just means putting it outside its comfort zone like a plane going through turbulence in air.  I came up with that actually on a flight, I think if my memory serves me correctly.  That’s the whole philosophy.  That’s the mindset, the imagery I want people to do.  It’s getting outside their comfort zone, you know, training hard but of course training safe.  We’re not doing anything unsafe here, so there’s definitely a progression in building up to this stuff.  That is how it goes down.”

If you’d like to hear more of Craig’s interview, sign up for the F*ree Elite Body Expert Series.