Don’t waste your precious time doing hours of boring cardio, the best way to slash your gym time and supercharge your fat loss is through High-Intensity Interval Training. A study from the University of NSW found that sprinting for 8 seconds on an exercise bike followed by 12 seconds of pedaling lightly for a total of 20 minutes burned 3 TIMES MORE FAT than people who exercised at a continuous pace for 40 minutes!!! Isn’t that exciting?!?!?
This method of training has been proven over decades to be far more effective at burning fat than normal steady-paced cardio (endurance cardio).
High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is a method of training where you perform short bouts of high-intensity exercise (or sprints), accompanied by short periods of recovery. Spin classes are a perfect example of this or you could pick any cardio exercise – running, cycling, walking on an incline, stepper, etc. just crank up the speed or resistance and go as hard as you can in 30 seconds to 1 minute and then slow down to catch your breath for about the same amount of time and then crank it up again and keep repeating that cycle for your entire workout.
Benefits of High-Intensity Interval Training:
- Minimize your training time – you only need to exercise for half the time of steady-paced cardio
- Maximize your fat-burning results – you burn far more fat after your workout compared to doing steady-paced cardio
- Increase fitness levels dramatically
- Makes the time go so much faster than if you’re sticking to the same, boring pace.
So why is high intensity so effective?
The true benefit of high-intensity exercise is in the kilojoule burn after your workout. If you’ve ever trained at a higher intensity and really pushed through a workout, you’ll know that exhausted feeling well. When you are this exhausted, your body is furiously burning energy in order to recover from the physical stress (exercise) that you just placed on your body. More technically speaking, following a bout of high-intensity exercise, you’ll create a heightened degree of excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC), which revs up your metabolism for many hours afterward.
A famous study that considered the effects of post-workout burns was in 1994. Two groups of exercisers were compared – Group A performed 30 to 45 minutes of steady-paced cardio, and Group B performed short interval training workouts lasting less than half the duration. The Results – more fat was burned after the short interval training workouts than the longer steady cardio.
A study from the University of NSW found that sprinting for 8 seconds on an exercise bike followed by 12 seconds of pedaling lightly for a total of 20 minutes burned 3 times more fat than people who exercised at a continuous pace for 40 minutes!!!