I recently received an email from an associate in Canada that supports what I have been saying about the importance of exercising at a high intensity.
Craig Ballantyne is a fitness and fat loss specialist who has developed one of the best home fitness programs around.
In his email Craig tells about some new research that shows that aerobic (cardio) exercise is effective for fat loss but only if it is high intensity.
Low intensity exercise does not work for fat loss. (This probably explains why so many people who go far a stroll around the neighbourhood every day don’t lose fat).
Researchers at the University of Virginia assigned 27 obese women (average age 51 years) to one of three groups…
1) No exercise training/control
2) 5 days per week of Low-intensity exercise (LIE) – don’t you love that acronym…truly represents the “slow cardio lie”
3) 3 days per week of high-intensity cardio exercise (HIC) plus 2 days per week of LIE
The high-intensity cardio was done above the Lactate Threshold which means it was fast enough to make people breath hard and feel uncomfortable. Training at your Lactate Threshold is a painful experience, because that is the intensity level where lactic acid will start to accumulate in your blood. A very fit person can exercise at their Lactate Threshold for about 30 minutes, but again, it is uncomfortable.
In the study, the subjects exercised in every session (both LIE and HIC) long enough to burn 400 calories…so neither group burned more calories than the other. It’s just that the HIC burned calories in shorter, more intense workouts.
The high-intensity aerobic exercise was much more effective in reducing abdominal fat.
Actually, the researchers found that low intensity exercise (LIE) didn’t do anything. The subjects in the Low-Intensity Exercise Cardio group did reduce their body fat.
On the other hand, the HIC (high-intensity cardio) group lost a significant amount of abdominal fat.
The research shows that…
a) Exercising harder results in more fat loss in less time.
b) Only hard exercise burns abdominal fat (which is where most people want to lose fat).
c) Low intensity aerobic exercise doesn’t do much for fat loss.
Craig quotes the researchers who state, “The present data indicate that body composition changes are affected by the intensity of exercise training, with HIC more effectively for reducing total abdominal fat and subcutaneous abdominal fat in obese women.”
So what does this mean for YOU?
It means to burn body fat and get fitter you need to exercise at high intensity.
The difficulty with this is that training at high intensity is uncomfortable (as a few people have reported back after trying my challenge to shorten their workouts in the last newsletter).
That’s why interval training works so well. You work hard for bursts during your exercise session, but don’t try to maintain a high intensity all the time. It’s the best of both worlds; you get to rev up the engine (your metabolism) but don’t wear it out by thrashing it all the time. (If you’re into cars that will make sense!)
If you tried my challenge to reduce the length of your exercise sessions and haven’t yet tried intervals, give it a go by going hard for a couple of minutes then easing off to recover. Do this four or five times during your exercise session.
If you’d like to find out more about Craig’s Turbulence Training program click here.
