Health Alert 28
Long duration exercise is a waste of your time.
In today’s message, you will learn a more effective way to burn fat and keep it off that takes just a few minutes per day. The system is simple. But if you follow it, you will simultaneously transform your physique, increase your available energy and increase the capacity of your heart and lungs.
When you exercise for more than about 15 minutes, you utilize mainly fat for energy – a good thing right. Wrong! This will induce your body to build more fat. It is preparing for the next exercise session when it will need fat to fuel the long duration.
Researchers at Laval University in Quebec wanted to find out which type of exercise program was best for fat loss. Participants were split into two groups. A long duration group cycled uninterrupted for 45 minutes. An interval group cycled in numerous short bouts (lasting from 15 to 90 seconds), resting in between.
The long endurance group burned twice as many calories as the interval group. But for every calorie burned, the interval group lost 9 times more fat.
*Burn fat during recovery.*
The reason for this phenomenon was uncovered in another recent study. Colorado State University researchers measured how long fat continues to be burned after brief periods of exercise. Participants exercised for two minutes then rested for one minute. They continued this cycle for 20 minutes.
The researchers found that participants continued to burn fat at a high rate 16 hours after the exercise. Even while they rested their fat oxidation was up by 62%.
Another study done at Stanford University School of Medicine tried to find out how long people needed to exercise to get this benefit. The study demonstrated that ten intense minutes of exercise is enough to burn body fat.
And in average non-athletic Americans, the prestigious Harvard Alumni Health Study has confirmed that ten-minute bouts of exercise promote health and weight loss.
If you want to lose fat, exercise in short bursts. You will then burn much more fat during the recovery period. And by doing this repeatedly you teach your body that it needs more energy stored in muscle for fast access. And you teach it that storing energy as fat is inefficient because you never exercise for long enough to make good use of the fat during the exercise.
You can use a wide variety of exercise tools. It only has to be an activity that will give your heart and lungs a bit of a challenge. I like bicycling and swimming because they avoid overuse injuries. What you do will depend on your level of fitness. The important thing is to advance gradually through time. Here are tips on getting started.
• Do a light warm up and stretch before each exercise session.
• Start with 20 minutes every other day. (This averages to only 10 minutes per day).
• Starting easy and increase gradually.
• As you get into better shape, you will increase the intensity in each session.
• Begin breaking those 20 minutes into shorter “mini-intervals” of exercise and rest.
• Use briefer and briefer episodes of gradually increasing intensity.
• A light activity “cool down” for a couple of minutes has been shown to reduce muscle soreness after exercise.
Note: The most common error is to assume that you must work at a higher level of perceived exertion to get results. This is not true. The point is to start with what is a comfortable level of exertion for you. But as that level of activity gets easier, you will focus on increasing the level of the activity rather than the duration.
To Your Health,
Al Sears MD