Belly Fat Loser

If you want to get rid of fat cells like these, try high intensity interval training, the best exercise to get rid of troubling belly fat.

High intensity is the best way to lose belly fat (or any other kind) without spending hours grunting, groaning, and sweating. In fact high intensity interval training has been clinically proven to be more effective for the time spent than other types of exercises to burn fat and increase cardiovascular fitness. High intensity resistance training is also fantastic for building lean muscle mass, a subject on which I’ve posted many times before.

The problem for many people today is that they have little time to train, and that’s where high intensity interval training comes in. It is a great form of exercise to lose fat, especially for those time limited individuals who are trying to squeeze in some exercise between meetings or soccer practice (the kids, not yours. If you have soccer practice on a regular basis, the belly fat will take care of itself in most cases.)

What is interval training? As the name implies, interval training is a technique where exercise is interrupted with intervals of no exertion. For example, you can run hard for 4 minutes, and then take 1 minute off. The key is to work at very high intensity for the exercise portion of the session. In this case you would train at 85% intensity for the 4 minutes. Does this actually work? Why yes, yes it does>

A study published in 2007 by researcher Jason Talanian at Canada’s University of Guelph looked at interval training for subjects that ranged from sedentary to extremely fit and found that their capacity to burn fat increased by 36% over the baseline. The great thing is that following the high intensity interval training the subjects capacity to burn fat during other forms of aerobic exercise increased as well. Cardiovascular fitness was also improved, even in subjects who were already competitive athletes, in this case, soccer players, who are among the most fit group of athletes.

Another study in England found similar results, and if anything was even more promising. Martin Gibala, an associate professor in the department of kinesiology of McMaster University tested subjects for cardio vascular fitness and exercise post excess consumption (EPOC) a measure of how much the metabolism is elevated after exercise. That post exercise metabolism rise is one of the best ways to make sure you’re burning fat for longer than the exercise period itself. I’ve posted on the importance of long term metabolic elevation for fat burning in the past. The findings of the McMaster study were encouraging, to say the least.

The University test subjects did 30-second bursts of “all out” cycling followed by four minutes of recovery. The test subjects repeated this pattern three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) for two weeks. Now, I don’t know about you, but most of the time I have engaged in training activities, it takes more than 2 weeks to achieve revolutionary results. I have noticed significant improvements in a short time period, but nothing like what this test discovered. In fact, Edward F. Coyle, PhD, director of the human performance laboratory at the University of Texas, Austin even said the findings “really are exciting”

In this case, “exciting” means performance improvements ranging from 81% to 169%, compared to the control group, which showed negligible improvements. The ability of the test subjects to cycle at 80% capacity was the performance measurement used for measuring the efficacy of the exercise regimen. The study’s findings were published in the Journal of Applied Physiology .

The test subjects who did the most exercise in the McMaster study only did 7 intervals. That means they only exercised three and a half minutes! That is astounding. Even considering the rest intervals, the total time they spent from start to stop of their exercise period was only about 15 and one half minutes.

Finally, researchers at the University of New South Wales and the Garvan Institute performed a study with a group of overweight women. The women performed a 20 minute cycling regime in which they sprinted on a stationary bike for 8 seconds followed by 12 seconds of cycling lightly. They lost significantly more weight than the control group, which did steady state exercise.

Now, all these studies show fairly conclusively that high intensity interval training is more effective at burning fat for the time spent exercising than other forms of exercise, and that it is fantastic for increasing fitness and elevating your metabolism. There is one caveat for all these studies however. You can’t out exercise a bad diet.

The sad fact is that you can exercise until the proverbial cows come home, and you’ll still look like one unless you make some diet modifications. As I’ve posted before, you may not even have to make drastic changes to your diet, but if you eat a bad, unhealthy, high calorie diet, you’ll likely remain fat, no matter if you’re using the best exercise to lose belly fat or not. If you do want to use the best exercise in your fat loss regimen, my money’s on high intensity interval training, though.

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