bfit4life
19 Jan, 2009

Ask the coach: Efficient methods for burning fat

Question

pictureI have limited time to exercise but I want to improve my fitness and start to change to my body-shape. I heard I must get into my fat burning zone by running slowly for a long period of time to burn fat. What would you recommend?

Answer

In life, you can either make time for fitness now or you can make time for illness later. There are 168hrs in a week and the busiest man on the planet Barrack Obama makes time to exercise 6 times a week. However, there are more efficient rewarding methods for burning fat than running slowly. Izumi Tabata an exercise scientist in Japan published studies in 1996 and 1997 in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. The Tabata protocol featured 20 seconds of all out effort with 10 second rest intervals. The entire workout, eight of these work-rest intervals, could be completed in four minutes. Dr. Tabata and his colleagues showed that anaerobic exercise could be used to increase our aerobic capacity and so there was no essential need to do steady state cardio. The one catch is that the Tabata intervals are too intense for most people.

EPOC or Excess Post Exercise Oxygen consumption is the key to long term fat loss. Most exercise advice is based on the idea that the only calories that matter are the ones that you burn during a workout. This is why we were told to do long, tedious, steady paced workouts. But if you work really hard like Tabata recommends, you will keep burning calories after your workout is completed. Slow steady state cardio does not have this benefit. And the higher the intensity of your workout you do, the more EPOC it delivers. The biggest benefits accrue after you stop training.

As a jogger you burn more calories during training than intervals but that advantage disappears when you figure EPOC into the equation. While you’re getting that post workout after burn you’re burning a higher percentage of fat calories than you would if you hadn’t exercised at all, in addition to the fact you’re burning total calories at a faster pace.

A study a Laval University in Quebec, published in a journal called metabolism back in 1994, showed that high intensity exercise burned off significantly more body fat than steady state endurance exercise. The researchers claim that each calorie you burn during high intensity exercise strips off nine times more fat than a calorie burned during steady-pace exercise.