Cut Your Workout Time with Intervals

If I ever gain 30 pounds, it's going to be from missing my workouts and eating too much junk (I grew up around a lot of junk food, and if it's in my house, I'll eat it).

Now the diet we can fix pretty simply, thanks to Isabel's program.

But what about workouts?

If I ever miss a workout, it's because I don't think I have enough time. You've probably felt that way too.

After all, the #1 reason for not working out is a lack of time.

If you get up at 5:30am to drive an hour to work, only to get home at 6pm and then have to launch right into carting the kids around, who can blame you for not working out?

Not when the magazines are telling you it takes 45 minutes of cardio, and another 45 minutes for isolation bodybuilding workouts to lose fat.

If that's the way you have to exercise to lose fat, then practically no one is going to be able to pull that off.

Fortunately, fat loss research shows us that you can lose belly fat in less time than it takes to do slow, boring cardio style workouts.

You just have to increase the intensity of the workout, but that allows you to cut your workout time in half (or more!). Stop doing cardio and start using interval training. Use this program:

=> Use this secret interval training program

But here's a common question I get when I tell folks about doing intervals instead of steady state cardio:

Q: What is the role of interval training vs. steady state cardio in a fat loss program?

Answer:
Interval training is more important than cardio. First of all, it gets more results in less time. And with "lack of time" being the
number one reason most people do not participate in a training program at all, clearly intervals are the winner here.

Now let's just assume that lack of time is not a problem. Well, interval training is still more effective because it applies more
"turbulence" to the muscle. Or in scientific terms, interval training results in a greater metabolic stress on the muscle.

And that causes more calories to be burned in the important 23.5 hours per day when you are not exercising.

From there, the muscle must work to recover, repair, and replenish the energy that was used in the training. It is much more metabolic work for the muscle to recover from interval training (and strength training) than it is to recover from aerobic training.

Therefore, in the post-exercise period, interval training results in more calories burned.

In fact, a popular study from Australia that shows interval training is superior to slow cardio for fat loss.

The researchers, Trapp & Boutcher put WOMEN through a 15-week study where one group was a control, one group did intervals (20 minutes of alternating sprints and recovery), and one group did 40 minutes of slow cardio.

The interval group lost 2.5kg of fat in 15 weeks on average (with one subject losing 7.7kg of fat), while the slow cardio group lost only 0.4kg of fat over 15 weeks on average.

The results speak for themselves.

So don't get hung up on how many calories are burned during a training session with aerobic training. That is not nearly as
important as how many total calories your body burns over the course of the day - and you will burn more with interval training.

And for those that subscribe to the fat burning zone as being important, again, you aren't looking at the big picture (the 24-hour calorie burning period). Instead, those that believe in the importance of the fat-burning zone have a myopic view of how the body works.

The same message applies to those people that live and die by the cardio on an empty stomach method. You're "nickel and dime-ing" the fat loss process, when really it's a much bigger budget to balance.

Look at the big picture. Get your nutrition in order, then focus your workouts on brief, intense strength and interval training workouts that increase your metabolism for the next 24 hours.

=> Use this interval program to burn fat in less time

 

Sincerely,

Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS
Author, Turbulence Training