Can I really get a good workout moving so slowly?

Oh, yes! You will discover that your muscles do even more metabolic work per unit of time moving slowly than they do moving fast. Faster movement unloads the muscles during parts of the repetition cycle (allowing them to momentarily rest) while overloading them during other parts of the cycle (risking injury) because of the relatively high inertia and momentum involved.

Isn't such a high intensity of exercise dangerous for some people?

The risk of injury does not come from the intensity of an exercise but from the inertial forces associated with rapid acceleration, fast movement, and abrupt changes in speed or direction. The SuperSlow protocol minimizes these forces.

What do your instructors recommend as a warm-up?

Your muscles remain close to normal body temperature at all times, even if your skin feels cool to the touch. Contrary to popular belief, muscles don't need to "warm up" beyond normal body temperature. By the time you start sweating, your muscles are already beyond their optimum operating temperature.

Your joints and muscles do require a bit of extra lubrication during exercise, but the most efficient way to lubricate them is to begin the actual exercise - slowly.

What about stretching before beginning an exercise session?

Some of our exercise machines have "stops", or limits, to the starting and ending positions of the movement arm. The muscles loaded during these exercises do not require stretching. The leg press is an example. Other exercises have no limits, and stretching is an important issue. SuperSlow instructors have their clients limit their range of movement in the stretched positions during the first two or three repetitions of these exercises, gradually increasing the stretch with each repetition. This is the most effective and efficient way to stretch these muscles and tendons. The calf (heel raise) exercise is an example.

Pre-exercise stretching, or stretching with little or no resistance, as is done with Yoga or Pilates, may loosen tendons and reduce the integrity and stability of your joints. High-intensity exercise performed through each limb's full range of motion is the best way to stretch your muscles without undermining joint stability.

How many sets do you recommend for each exercise during a workout session?

One, supported by plenty of scientific research - all that is required to stimulate muscle growth is to fatigue the muscles a certain - not yet precisely known - amount. Inroading the muscles to momentary failure within 60 to 180 seconds (depending somewhat on the subject and the exercise) is known to be sufficient to stimulate the growth mechanism. Inroading them repeatedly during a workout session does not stimulate significantly more growth, and it reduces - or uses up - your body's limited recovery capacity, possibly diminishing the muscles' ability to grow stronger, and undermining what you're trying to accomplish.

How often should I work out?

Each person and each muscle group may require different recovery periods in order to assure maximum growth. As a rule of thumb, novices and those with smaller muscles need as little as 24 to 48 hours of recovery, while advanced subjects and those with large muscle mass typically require 5 to 14 days of recovery between workouts.

Your instructor will recommend the ideal workout program and schedule for you, but generally if you're a novice you could work out as many as three times the first week as you learn good form and your instructor experimentally approximates your ideal resistance for each exercise. After that you will want to reduce the frequency of your workouts to twice a week for a few weeks and then to once a week. Once you've reached your genetically determined maximum strength, you could opt to train every other week to maintain that strength.

What is the duration of a typical workout session?

About 20 minutes. It takes only 1 to 3 minutes to inroad the muscles during each of 5 or 6 compound exercises. That adds up to about 10 to 15 total minutes under load. Add a minute or less to move to each successive exercise, and you end up with an exercise session of about 20 minutes in duration.

Twenty minutes? You mean I can get fit and stay fit in as little as 20 minutes per week?

Precisely! And, because the workout environment is kept cool and dry and your workout brief, you don't work up a sweat. So you don't need to waste additional time showering after your workout.

What about my cardiovascular conditioning? Should I engage in "aerobic" activities between workouts?

No. You get plenty of cardiovascular and metabolic stimulation during your workout. Once you reach a high level of intensity with minimal rest between exercises, you may regard your workout to be a great "cardio" stimulus. In fact, the only way to effectively condition your cardiovascular system and metabolic pathways is to engage in medium- or high-intensity activities which produce lactic acid. SuperSlow exercise is the ideal way to produce this stimulus.

Incidentally, there is no such thing as conditioning the lungs. The more you stress the lungs (such as when doing sustained "aerobic" activities for long periods of time), the sooner they will succumb to any of a number of maladies. Also remember that, while sustainable "aerobic" activities may increase your body's efficiency in performing these movements, they do not stimulate muscle growth, because they do not significantly fatigue your muscles.

Increases in heart strength due to exercise are minimal and contribute little to your body's efficient use of oxygen. Most of the conditioning effect of exercise is the result of metabolic adaptations which enhance the ability of muscle tissue to absorb and utilize oxygen.

What do you mean by "momentary failure"?

As long as your muscles are under a meaningful load, individual muscle fibers are temporarily becoming exhausted and ceasing to respond to neural commands. Eventually, enough fibers will have stopped responding that you will no longer be able to move the resistance (weights) in the positive (upward) direction. This is called "momentary failure" or, more accurately, "momentary positive failure", and it's nothing to be ashamed of. In fact your goal (after the first few workouts, anyway) is to achieve momentary failure with each exercise.

When you achieve momentary positive failure, your instructor may urge you to continue trying to lift the weights (but no lunging, jerking, squirming, groaning, or restricting your breathing allowed!). After a few seconds of being stalled you may find that - against your will - the weights begin to move downward against your best effort. This is known as "static failure". Or your instructor may prompt you to begin slowly lowering the weights to the bottom-out position prior to static failure. At this point, you will have inroaded the strength of the loaded muscle group significantly. SuperSlow theory posits that this degree of muscle inroading is necessary and sufficient to maximally stimulate the growth mechanism.

What are the main benefits of this kind of exercise for the average, healthy person?

The most direct benefits are greater strength, greater endurance, and improved cardiovascular and metabolic conditioning - all resulting in greater functional ability. Indirect benefits include raising depressed HDL ("good cholesterol") levels, securing and lubricating the joints, protecting against back pain and debility, enhancing the glucose receptor sites for Type II diabetics, and increasing bone density in postmenopausal women. We expect to find additional benefits in the near future.

Will this type of  exercise help me lose weight?

Yes. But don't expect miracles from any exercise program. The only way to lose weight is to either consume fewer calories or to burn more calories while holding caloric intake steady. Without exercise, losing weight through reduced caloric intake results in loss of both fat and muscle tissue. What exercise does is prevent the loss of muscle tissue when reducing caloric intake.

When meaningful exercise is performed regularly, your body's muscle mass is actually increased, which in turn increases your basal metabolism. "Basal metabolism" refers to your body's rate of burning calories when you're at rest. So regular SuperSlow exercise combined with limiting or reducing caloric intake results in fat loss, muscle growth, and overall weight loss.

Don't "aerobic" activities also help with weight loss?

If you are referring to activities like running, bicycling, and swimming, these activities do burn significantly more calories than sedentary activities like watching TV. And if you also limit caloric intake, you will lose weight. But you will lose both fat and muscle tissue, because these activities are not intense enough to fatigue muscles sufficiently to stimulate muscle growth. And because there is no muscle growth, there is no increase in basal metabolism, which means you don't get the bonus that exercise gives you of a continuous 24-hour per day elevated rate of calorie burning. Also realize that one can easily consume, in just a few minutes, the number of calories that would take several hours to burn off by way of steady-state activity.

Furthermore, if you engage in long sustained periods of running, treadmill walking, cycling, stair climbing, or similar activities, you will actually lose muscle mass, even if you continue to work out. Your body has an amazing ability to adapt and become more efficient at doing what it's being asked to do over the long term. In order to become more efficient at long-duration, steady-state activities, it will rid itself of energetically demanding muscle tissue unless that muscle is being used meaningfully on a regular basis.

And the repetitive stress which these activities put on the joints and small bones of the feet will likely result in debilitating overuse injuries which will reduce your quality of life later on, if not immediately. How many people do you know who suffer from knee or hip problems, lower back problems, or plantar fasciitus (heel spurs)?

What is the best way to reduce my caloric intake?

Buy a book or booklet listing the caloric content of a wide variety of foods. Keep a record of your daily caloric intake for a couple of weeks before attempting to change your eating habits. You will find that estimating and recording the calories you consume with every meal and snack - every day - will give you the immediate feedback you need to voluntarily reduce your caloric intake.

After obtaining a 2-week baseline, reduce your total daily caloric intake by about 10 percent. Or, if you are just beginning to exercise regularly, then consider keeping your caloric intake constant instead of reducing it to see if you get the desired conversion of fat to muscle.

What about the popular low-carb, high-protein, higher-fat diets?

There is now plenty of evidence that saturated fat and high-fat, high-protein diets may not be causes of heart disease or obesity. Rather, a high-carbohydrate diet - and its associated tendency to keep blood insulin levels high - may be the culprit. The body will not burn its fat stores in the presence of high levels of insulin. Many low-fat products have added carbs and trans-fats, making them potentially harmful.

In view of the current popularity of low-carb diets such as that of Dr. Atkins, the Eades (Protein Power), and Sugar Busters, and the research supporting the efficacy of these dietary regimens, consider counting grams of carbohydrate instead of calories and trying to keep your daily carb consumption below 100 grams.

Some people may be more successful not counting carbs or calories, but rather cutting out certain foods such as candy, sweet desserts and snacks, potatoes, rice, bread, cereals and other "high-glycemic" foods (those which quickly elevate blood sugar levels and invoke an insulin spike), and then eating reasonable portion sizes of other foods. It sometimes helps with compliance to allow yourself one day a week to eat some of the otherwise restricted foods.

Don't people who work out need lots of extra protein or protein supplements?

No. Building muscle tissue does require more protein than what is necessary to maintain a constant amount of muscle mass. Remember, however, that a 3-ounce piece of meat the size of a deck of cards contains the daily protein requirement for the average person (about 50 grams). Most Americans already eat far more protein than their bodies need, so no increase is needed for them.

If you consume only the minimum recommended protein for your size and want to increase muscle mass, you should increase your protein consumption by about 50 percent. Most people can easily accomplish this by eating a bit more protein-rich vegetables, dairy products, fish, and/or meat without resorting to protein supplements (powders, shakes).