Are you one of the many people that believe that the best way to lose unwanted body fat is to spend countless hours doing so called long duration “cardio” on the treadmill, bike or X trainer. Whilst many people are struggling to lose the unwanted body fat doing it that way, I have my personal training clients and athletes doing things slightly different.

The fat loss training workouts that I design give my clients the “best bang for their buck”. By this I mean that I design programs that achieve the most amount of calorific expenditure both during the workout and afterwards.

Is there a better way of doing your “cardio” that speeds up your fat loss, yes!!

What would you say if I could show you a fat loss workout that helped you to do the following:

• Double the calories you expend in half the workout time
• Allow you to continue to burn calories for hours and even days after your workout (even while you sleep)
• Protect you from burning vital muscle mass that gives you your shape
• Slows down the aging process
• Increases your top end fitness (Vo2 max)

Would it surprise you to learn that participating in anaerobic work like strength training and high intensity interval training is what you need to be doing? Interval training as opposed to aerobic work like jogging is so much more effective at helping you change your body shape and body composition?

Lets take a look at one the main reasons why this happens. Its referred to as EPOC (Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption)

What is EPOC?

In a nut shell EPOC is the period after exercise where the oxygen consumption (deficit) and energy consumed during your workout must be paid back.  The oxygen deficit is determined by the intensity of the exercise being performed.

After your workout the amount of oxygen that you consume can stay elevated for minutes up to hours which allows your body to metabolize nutrients, replenish the energy stores that have been used up and reload the depleted oxygen stores in the muscles and blood.

So the more intense the workout, the more oxygen is consumed and energy used per minute. This all taken into account means you will have EPOC lasting for a longer period of time and ultimately helping speed up your metabolism.

So if your goal is to create a higher EPOC, the best choice of exercise is going to be high intensity anaerobic exercise and not steady state aerobic training like many people perform. Anaerobic training will burn calories while you are doing it, but it will also increase the amount of calories that you burn for hours afterwards. How do you fancy going to bed knowing that you’re burning more calories even when your asleep?

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that aerobic (lower intensity, longer duration) exercise will not burn calories whilst you’re doing it. What I’m explaining to you here is that lower intensity exercise has very little metabolic cost in the minutes or hours after the exercise is over. What you burn doing aerobic work is all you get. On the other hand anaerobic high intensity exercise keeps the metabolic fire burning for longer!!

What do my clients do?

So what benefit would this article be to you if I didn’t provide you with an example of the interval conditioning that I ask my personal training clients to do?

Firstly choose your piece of equipment. I prefer to use the treadmill, outdoors, the rowing machine or a spin bike.  Now when I say high intensity I don’t mean still being able to talk to the person next to you, I mean you should be falling off the machine by the end of each rep!

Conditioning programs like these last 30 minutes maximum and can be performed either on separate days or at the end of an upper body strength training day. If you have trained your lower body properly, you will not be able to do this so don’t even try!!

The workout

Week 1 - 3

Each rep lasts 30 seconds and the rest is 90 seconds (that’s a 1:3 work rest ratio). Perform active rest for this program and do the program all the way through without stopping. Perform your intervals at 95% to 100% of your maximum and recover in between at 50% to 60%. If you use the treadmill and run at speed 12 mph, your recovery speed will therefore be at 6 mph.

You must not change your work to rest ratio as this changes the energy system that is being trained. To make the workout harder you can increase the speed, incline (intensity) on the machine. You must always do a 5 minute warm up with each session.

The total number of sets you perform each workout in month 1 will always be 12. Make sure you record your speed, incline or level used.  

Try to increase either the incline or speed up each workout

Week 4 - 7

Each rep lasts 60 seconds and the rest is 180 seconds (that’s a 1:3 work rest ratio). Perform active rest for this program and do the program all the way through without stopping. Perform your intervals at 95% to 100% of your maximum and recover in between at 50% to 60%. If you use the treadmill and run at speed 12 mph, your recovery speed will therefore be at 6 mph.

The total number of sets you perform each workout in month 2 will always be 6. Make sure you record your speed, incline or level used.  

Try to increase either the incline or speed up each workout

Something new for you and it works!

So if you were bored with your old “cardio” routine and were looking for something new, get your teeth tucked into this and as a bonus you’ll see your body composition change before your very eyes!

1% body fat loss per week

The clients that perform this type of training alongside a personalised strength training program lose on average 1% body fat per week and 1 – 2 lbs in weight. This is the sort of fat loss that people get when they sign up to the M10 Body transformation programme!

In my next article I’ll be explaining why strength training is another tool to achieving ultimate fat loss and helping you get one step closer to that Body transformation.   

References - The essentials of sports and exercise nutrition by John Berardi and Ryan Andrews