Get your meat in motion
If you’re dieting now you probably dieted before. And it didn’t work, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this. One of the things that people often do that sabotages their efforts before they even begin is that they do not formulate an exercise plan. Now again, I’m not going to ask you to do something super difficult. We don’t have to do 300 pound squats, we don’t have to run laps around the local football field, we don’t have to do anything that’s going to make you uncomfortable. What you do need to understand is that the amount of weight that you lose and the speed with which you use lose it is going to be directly proportional to the amount of effort that you put fort. So as I move ahead with this discussion keep that in mind.
We’re going to concentrate on three different kinds of activity. One of them you’re doing already and we’ll talk about that last. For right now is going to get into the one that you’re probably most familiar with when it comes to losing weight. Aerobic exercise activity, also known as cardio training.
At this point you’ve probably heard quite a bit from quite a few different sources about getting into the “fat burning zone”. This is total bulshit. There is no fat burning zone. Yes, I know, it’s right there on the Lifecycle. It’s part of a program on your treadmill. I’m here to tell you that this is total crap. Here’s what actually happens in your body:
You taken a certain number of calories. You burn calories. If the calories you burn are more than the calories you take in you lose weight. When we see these pieces of equipment with fat burning zones noted on them we need to stop and think about what they’re actually measuring. Does that treadmill actually have a way to determine how much fat you’re burning? Of course not. All that treadmill can do is take the parameters that you punched in and your heart rate and perform a calculation. Now these calculations can be useful in terms of tracking your progress. If you find that you can do a fast walk in a 5° incline for 30 minutes and cover 4 miles this week as opposed to 3.6 miles last week, well then you’ve made progress. But it doesn’t really say anything about how much fat you’re actually burning.
So how should we use these pieces of equipment? Thankfully, a lot of research has come to light in the last several years that indicates exactly how to do cardio exercise to burn the most fat possible. There’s good news and there’s bad news here. First the good news
You don’t have to do cardio training for hours on end to burn fat. In fact, you don’t have to do cardio training for one hour. In fact, you don’t have to do cardio training for one of one hour. 20 minutes is usually all it will take.
And now for the bad news.
The kind of aerobic activity that seems to burn the most fat is not steady-state. In other words, it does not consist of simply walking on a slight incline on your treadmill. What you need to do to burn the most fat off of your stomach in the quickest time possible, is to put forth some real effort. And the way you put that effort forth is by using a technique called HIIT. This stands for high intensity interval training. And we’ve got a couple of terms here so let’s break this down. High intensity means high intensity for you. Nobody’s going to expect you to step off the bench so to speak and run a four minute mile. Interval training simply refers to the fact that you are going to alternate periods of high intensity exercise with periods of low intensity exercise.
Research has shown that alternating high and low intensity exercise is easier on your joints, better for your heart, and more accurately simulates real-world activities. HIIT also does something else — something very important to us and our current endeavor. HIIT has been found to be the single best way to utilize post exercise oxygen consumption. This is normally referred to in the fitness industry as PEOC.
PEOC is your body using more oxygen and therefore burning more calories than it normally would for several hours after about of high intensity interval training. There’s still a lot of debate as to why this actually happens but all we need to know for our purposes here is that it does. What this means is that by utilizing this training technique you can burn more fat faster while exercising for a shorter period of time.
See I told you it would be easy!
