Rapid Fat Loss

Today I read some very interesting material about rapid fat loss that confirmed something I was suspecting for a long time. Aerobic workouts are not effective at burning fat.

The problem is that everywhere you look you are told that aerobics, treadmills and long periods of steady exercise are the way to lose fat. But when you look at the typical people involved in marathons, you get the athletes, but there are many overweight people in the race too. Also, the thin ones look skinny and often don’t have great body shapes.

Now compare this to say 100 meter sprinters. They are all muscular and have hardly any fat.

Training for a marathon takes hours of long distance running, but sprinter training involves short bursts of intense training. I remember watching a video of some sprinters working out and they were doing sit ups and hard, intense exercises.

Also, boxers are muscular and have low body fat. They have short 3 minute rounds of intense physical activity.

So it would seem best to train at a high level of intensity for a short time rather than low level intensity for a long time.

Introducing Turbulence Training…

The author of this training program confirmed my suspicion that short duration workouts are best for fat loss.

What I read was that if you train for endurance, your body gets efficient at using fat for fuel so it gets harder to burn off the fat. Also your body may get better at storing fat to be used in your long endurance training such as aerobics.

But if you do strength building exercises using your own body weight for resistance, then you tone your muscles and the tired muscles re-build by consuming your excess body fat long after the training.

Turbulence training is a way to fit in short exercise periods 3 times per week so even the busiest people can benefit. Also, you use your own body in preference to complex and expensive gym equipment.

A key feature of the exercise program is variety in the exercises so your body does not get used to any particular routine and hence efficient at burning your fat. You want to burn your fat inefficiently so you burn as much as possible in a short a time as possible.

An obvious benefit of this variety in the exercises is that the program does not get boring, so you are less likely to give up.

So, I will be doing more short, intense training from now on rather than long steady training. I really want to make a video of myself doing this stuff, so I dusted off the camcorder today and charged the battery. Now I just need to find a nice weather day to go out and do some filming.

My plan is to go to a small park overlooking the city and do a quick basic exercise routine. Then I will do a hill climb to see how many calories I can burn in a short period of time. I have a calorie counting watch for this purpose. It works off your weight and heart rate.

Stay tuned…