You need only a few minutes here and there throughout your busy day to burn fat; there’s no such thing as not having time for fat-burning exercise.
You need to know the correct technique.
This exercise technique has been shown by many scientific studies to be highly effective at burning fat.
The technique can be applied across the board as far as type of movement (e.g., walking, pedaling, stepping, running, hopping).
One of the studies that shows the effectiveness this fat burning approach was done by McMaster University researchers, as they demonstrated that just six minutes of intense exercise a week equates to 60 minutes of medium intensity exercise.
Find the setting of your preferred type of cardio equipment that requires you to push your hardest to maintain.
You should be able to maintain it for half a minute, after which you’re very exhausted. Find your settings for this: 30 seconds takes it all out of you.
NOTE: Treadmill users should NOT hold onto the machine other than to change the settings.
Once the settings are in place, KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF. If you can’t, you’re going too fast or the incline is too high.
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Between each 30 second blast, you go easy for 2-4 minutes. Do 6-8 work intervals total. Then you’re finished.
The McMaster study examined peoplle who did these “sprint” exercises only three times per week.
The report said that in the study group, muscles had a substantial increase in citrate synthase, which is an enzyme suggestive of the muscle cells’ ability to use oxygen: fat burning.
Lack of time to exercise for very busy people, then, no longer holds water.
McMaster University conducted another study that shows a busy person with no time to exercise will actually get more bang out of their buck with “sprint” training, also known as high intensity interval training or burst exercise.
This other study, however, reveals that interval training need not be your absolute maximum effort in order to still be very effective.
Study author Professor Martin Gibala explained in the paper, “Doing 10 one-minute sprints on a standard stationary bike with about one minute of rest in between, three times a week, works as well at improving muscle as many hours of conventional long-term biking less strenuously.”
The less-than “all out” effort is ideal for those busy women and men who are new to exercise, are older or have an injury to work around.
Gabala, et al, has demonstrated that these brief spurts of high exertion are just as effective at also cutting one’s risk of diabetes, strokes and even heart attacks.
In fact, to obtain the same results from traditional exercise, the busy individual would have to invest over 10 hours of medium-level bicycling over a 14 day period!
When I was a personal trainer I’d inform my time-crunched clients that the fat burning effects are incited by the increased release of human growth hormone and testosterone during the periods of high intensity.
These hormones are natural fat burners, and long duration cardio does not trigger higher release of these hormones.
With intensity interval training, in which you are pedaling or walking or jogging at work-effort for anywhere from a total of three to 10 minutes, more fat will be burned — much more — than if you did an hour of “slow” or steady state cardio!
Do the math: How much time does the busy indiviual need to perform six, 30-second intense bursts, including the several minutes’ rest in between?
