Fast Fat-burning Fitness
You know me, I’m all about reducing inflammation to help you create an amazing life of good health and weight loss. Do you know that exercise is one of the most powerful ways to reduce inflammation?
What if I told you that you DO NOT have to hop a treadmill or an elliptical for what seems to be an eternity? What if I told you that in just minutes, 3-4 times a week would be all you needed to build real heart strength, lung power, create more energy and vigor than traditional cardio, burn fat faster – even while resting? You can with High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). HIIT is simply short bursts of short bursts of exertion followed by rest and recovery.
Doing HIIT teaches your body to burn fat and build muscle, it greatly increases your lung capacity, turns your body into a fat burning machine with strong muscles and youthful features. Where long slow aerobics diminishes your lung power and teaches your body to burn muscle! Long slow aerobics like jogging does just this. Rest, recovery and progressive changes are the missing components to traditional aerobics.
If you think about it, our ancestors never jogged for 30 to 60 minutes. They lived their life hunting prey or running from it. Their exertion came in short bursts followed by rest. They lived their life where short, intense exertions were the order of the day and, most importantly, it is still hardwired in our genes.
Do you know that the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine, have taken long-slow cardio out of their exercise guidelines? They now recommend moderate to vigorous cardio. Why? Because it just doesn’t work. The reason? It doesn’t work both processes of your heart muscle, the aerobic and aneroebic and it also doesn’t work your fast-twitch fiber. Your what fibers? Yes, muscle fibers.
HIIT really boils down to engaging all three types of your muscle fibers: Fast-twitch, slow-twitch and super-fast-twitch muscle fibers to create amazing fitness, health and weight loss, especially the fast twitch muscles that traditional long slow cardio doesn’t touch. And your time investment to reap the benefits? Minimal.
This is why, even though you are grueling away on the treadmill for hours a week, you’re not seeing results! Because the biggest changes occur after not during the exercise. Your metabolism is affected for several days afterward. So just using the other half of your muscle fibers, your fast-twitch muscles, and you see excellent results!
When you do traditional slow cardio, you only work the slow-twitch muscles, but not the fast and super fast twitch muscles which are the ones that release Human Growth Hormone. Human Growth Hormone is key for optimal fitness and more. HIIT increases fat loss by boosting human growth hormone production and is often referred to as “the fitness hormone.” People with the highest levels of HGH are generally the healthiest, leanest and fittest. And guess what? You can have this in only minutes a few times a week!
Here are a few examples of HIIT workouts you might like to try:
- The P.A.C.E. workout in total is 12 minutes, 3-4 times a week. This workout starts out with low intensity for four minutes with complete rest until recovered after each set. All sets (4 minutes, 3 minutes, 2 minutes, 1 minute) become shorter, yet more intense.
- The Peak Fitness workout is a 30 second workouts with 90 seconds low intensity recovery. Repeat 8 times. Frequency is 3-4 times weekly.
- Tabata is a 20 seconds workout with 10 seconds rest. Repeat 8 times. Frequency is 2- 4 times weekly.
- The Little Method is a high intensity 60 second workout with 75 seconds of low intensity recovery. Repeat 12 times. Frequency is 3 times a week.
So give it a try! What have you got to lose? Certainly not time or your health!