Getting More From Your Workout For Less Time… WAY Less!
What if I told you that you can achieve more in a mere 15 minutes of exercise than the girl jogging on the treadmill for an hour?
A 15 minute work out that can sculpt your muscles, help you build and maintain your cardiovascular health, and burn fat! Is it starting to sound too good to be true yet? Because how doable is 15 minutes? Totally doable. Everyone has at least 15 minutes a day to dedicate to fitness. But does it really work with a work out? The answer is a resounding YES!
You have to do it right for it to work. Here is a hint: think back to the time when you were a kid and it was a beautiful summer day. You were playing outside. You’d run and laugh and jump till you couldn’t move, then you’d drop to the ground and feel the grass all around you while you rested a minute or two, then jumped up and did it all over again. Same idea, new name: High Intensity Interval Training or HIIT!
HIIT alternates between intense bursts of activity and fixed periods of less-intense activity or even complete rest. For example, a good starter workout is running as fast as you can for 1 minute and then walking for 2 minutes. Repeat that 3-minute interval five times for a 15-minute fat blasting workout. (Click here for a great program that integrates HIIT with weight lifting!)
Research shows (and we love research) you can achieve more in 15 minutes of HIIT (done a minimum of three times a week) than jogging on the treadmill for an hour. And according to a 2011 study presented at the American College of Sports Medicine Annual Meeting, just 2 weeks of high-intensity intervals improves your aerobic capacity as much as 6 to 8 weeks of endurance training. WOW!!! Efficient and faster!
So how is this possible???
First, the after burn effect of all that intense exertion kicks your body’s repair cycle into hyperdrive. That means you burn more fat and calories in the 24 hours after a HIIT workout than you do after, say, a steady-pace run. (Think a grueling hour of cardio… yuck!)
Second, HIIT targets fat loss, not muscle loss. Anyone who has been on a diet knows that it’s hard to not lose muscle mass along with fat. While steady state cardio seems to encourage muscle loss, studies show that both weight training and HIIT workouts preserve those hard-earned muscles while ensuring most of the weight lost comes from fat stores. Win/win!
Third, HIIT stimulates production of your human growth hormone (HGH) by up to 450% during the 24 hours after you finish your workout. HIIT does this by targeting your fast twitch muscle fibers. They break down faster causing your body to repair them more quickly producing the HGH to build the broken down muscle back up, also increasing your muscle mass. This is great news since HGH is not only responsible for increased caloric burn but also slows down the aging process, making you younger both inside and out!
So feel like a child again. Play for your workout and in about an hour per week, yes a week not a day, you can get a full work out in that creates a beautiful body inside and out! That I want to commit to!
