Higher intensity interval cardio takes off belly fat....

Today's post: Tuesday, 10-28-2008

Many people want to lose extra belly or abdominal fat the most.

That desire makes excellent sense.

If you have a flat belly with no extra fat, you look better and find it easier to fit into your clothes. You look healthier. In fact, studies have found that for both men and women they appeal more to the opposite sex if in men their waist is 90 % of their hip measurement or less and in women if their waist is 30 % of their hip measurement or less.

In addition, belly or abdominal fat is the fat on your body that tends to predict high blood sugar that may develop into type II diabetes and heart disease. It also produces angiotensin that contributes to or causes high blood pressure.

Exercise CAN help. But it’s been found that some kinds of exercise work MUCH better than others to take off belly fat and keep it off.

The really good news is that the most effective kinds of exercise burn fat faster and take less time to do than the less effective ones.

Here are a couple of articles from Early To Rise from yesterday and today that make this point very well.:

This one was in their enewsletter from yesterday.:

"This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, an e-zine dedicated to making money, improving your health and quality of life. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com."

“The Low-Intensity Cardio Lie

By Craig Ballantyne

Once in a while, a study comes along that surprises me. For instance, I recently found one showing that cardio works for fat loss - as long as it is high-intensity cardio.

Researchers at the University of Virginia assigned 27 obese women (average age 51) to one of three groups...

1. The control group did no exercise training.

2. The second group did five days per week of low-intensity exercise (LIE). (Gotta love that acronym... truly represents the "slow cardio lie.")

3. The third group did three days per week of high-intensity cardio exercise (HIC) plus two days per week of LIE.

Instead of exercising for a specific length of time in every session - LIE or HIC - the subjects exercised long enough to burn 400 calories. So no group burned more calories than the others, though the third group burned the 400 calories faster in their three HIC workouts each week.

And HIC kicked LIE's butt! The study found that the subjects in the low-intensity exercise group did not lose fat. On the other hand, the subjects in the high-intensity cardio group lost a significant amount of abdominal fat.

So, once again, research has shown that...

Exercising harder results in more fat loss in less time.

Only hard exercise burns belly fat.
Low-intensity cardio won't help you lose fat.
I prefer interval training to cardio for my clients who are on a fat-loss program. But the results of this study have influenced me to make a slight change in my recommendations.

I now occasionally throw in some high-intensity cardio for my clients, usually as a 20- or 30-minute session done at a pace they can barely maintain for that length of time. They don't like it, but it works. (Most of them prefer the interval training.)

If you are interested in trying this, you can add HIC to your program up to three times per week. Just remember to self-monitor your body for any symptoms of overuse injuries - and, as always, TRAIN SAFE.

I'll give the last word to the University of Virginia researchers who stated, "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." “

This one was their health article today.

"This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, an e-zine dedicated to making money, improving your health and quality of life. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com."

“Your Metabolism Slows Down and Stays Down, Unless...

By Craig Ballantyne

I have some bad news for you. According to scientists at New York's Presbyterian Medical Center at Columbia University, folks who succeed in losing weight tend to wind up suffering from a lower than expected metabolic rate. This means that if you lose weight, you will burn fewer calories each day than someone of the same weight who was never overweight.

Seems unfair, doesn't it?

The researchers studied three groups: subjects who had lost 10 percent of their bodyweight and kept it off for up to one year, subjects who just recently lost 10 percent of their bodyweight, and a control group.

All of the subjects were studied for 24 hours straight to determine how many calories they burned. Results showed that both weight-loss groups burned fewer calories during the 24 hours than the control group, even though they were matched by weight and gender.

This decrease in calorie burning is just one of the many reasons you will find it easier to regain weight after you lose weight.

So what can you do?

You must do everything you can to boost your metabolism. I highly recommend to all of my clients that they use interval training or high-intensity cardio rather than low-intensity cardio, and that they also engage in high-intensity resistance training three times per week. By performing high-intensity exercise, you will put up the greatest fight against your handicapped metabolism.“

X* X* X* X* X*

Note that you can burn 100 calories doing higher intensity interval cardio in 8 minutes or less. Walking takes 15 to 20 minutes to burn 100 calories. So the higher intensity interval cardio is much faster to do.

As their earlier articles and other sources have found, high intensity cardio done as interval cardio or training that has moderately short periods at a high moderate pace or level of effort which you alternate with shorter periods of much a much faster pace and greater level of effort both gets you into shape faster than steady pace cardio and much more safely than continuous high intensity cardio. The overall pace of the exercise by the end or the miles traveled may be the same for the exercise done with the several intervals of varying intensity as it would be for the continuous version. But the several intervals of varying intensity will get you in shape faster; it is much safer to do; and it burns fat and increases your metabolism MORE. In fact, your overall pace will soon be FASTER for the interval version than it would have been for the steady state version.

By doing this kind of interval cardio several times a week and doing progressive strength training at least twice a week in which you also have periods where you work quite hard, you burn belly fat best and keep your metabolism high the best.