Intensity Exercise – Weight Loss Diet Solutions

Should you do High Intensity Cardio Exercise or is walking good enough? Everyone has wondered at some point in time which cardio exercise is better. To put it in simple terms, both low and high intensity exercises will help you to burn off body fat. The question here is which is the most effective to burn off more body fat.

When scientists first discovered that during intensive exercises, your body burns glycogen, which is a form of stored carbohydrates that are stored in your liver and muscles for energy. During low intensity exercises, your body will burn a lot of fat.

What Burns More – Low Intensity or High Intensity Cardio Exercise

If your wondering whether or not it works, the answer is no because there are so many obese people still around. Even though they are working out with low intensity routines, it still makes you wonder how it can be.

High Intensity Cardio Exercise

The scientists were right when they said the human body burns more body fat during low intensity exercises like walking or swimming. During a high intensity exercise such as running, the body will burn a lot more calories. Even if some of the calories burnt are from glycogen, there are still many fat calories burned as well.

To put the icing on the cake, when your store of glycogen gets low, the carbohydrates from your food you eat will later get converted into glycogen to fill up the store and won’t be converted to body fat when they are left unused for energy.

High intensity cardio exercise will juice up your metabolism even after you have completed your workout. What this means, is that your body will continue to burn body fat hours after you have left the gym. This effect is nearly non existent in low intensity cardio or aerobic workout.

Accumulatively, your body will burn up more and more calories during and after you have finished a high intensity cardio exercise that it will with low intensity. You can inject high intensity exercises into your cardio workout by introducing some interval training. You can walk for 5 minutes or so, then break into some jogging for another 5 minutes or so. Then, walk briskly again until you have caught your breath and then sprint for a minute before you walk again. From this point, simply alternate your running and walking for the next 15 minutes until you are finished.

One of the best things about cardio is the more you do it, the more energy you’ll have. Cardio will help you to burn calories, although its more useful for keeping your energy levels high.

If you’ve never tried cardio before, you should give it a shot. If you like to exercise, you’ll find cardio the best way to boost your energy and keep in top shape. If you are just starting out, you’ll want to go slow and keep your cardio exercise in track – as it is very easy to over exert yourself.

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High intensity interval training, also known as HIIT, has become immensely popular in the last decade. HIIT involves alternating brief bursts of very high intensity exercise (work intervals) with brief segments of lower intensity exercise (recovery intervals). One problem with some types of HIIT is that they call for such high intensity bursts – literally all out sprints – that they’re not practical for everyone, and possibly not even safe for older or overweight individuals.

A recent study out of McMaster University has tested a protocol for HIIT that produces impressive results in a short period of time without the need for “all-out” sprints…

Many of the previous studies on high intensity interval training used ALL-OUT intervals on a specialized cycle ergometer, pedaling against a high resistance.

Results of High Intensity Interval Training Study

High Intensity Interval Training

This type of training takes a high level of commitment and motivation and can result in feelings of severe discomfort and even nausea.

One of my colleagues mentioned in our Burn the Fat Forums that he remembers exercise physiology class in college where they did all out cycle ergometer interval sprint testing and nearly everyone either puked or passed out.

The Tabata protocol for example, is a brief but brutal 4 minute HIIT workout often spoken of by trainers and trainees alike with both appreciation and dread. It’s no walk in the park.

The truth is, some high intensity interval training protocols which have been tested in the lab to produce big improvements in cardiovascular function and conditioning in a short period of time, may not be practical or safe, especially for beginners, obese or older adults.

In this new study out of McMaster University, a HIIT protocol that was more practical and attainable for the general population was tested to see how the results would compare to the more “brutal” very short, but extremely intense types of HIIT.

Here’s what the new HIIT protocol looked like:

Study duration: 2 weeks
Frequency: 3 sessions per week (mon, wed, fri)
Work intervals: 60 seconds @ constant load
Intensity Work intervals: “high intensity cycling at a workload that corresponded to the peak power achieved at the end of the ramp VO2peak test (355 +/- 10W)”
Recovery intervals: 75 seconds
Intensity Recovery Intervals: Low intensity cycling at 30W”
Rounds: 8-12 intervals
Progression: 8 intervals 1st two workouts, 10 intervals second two workouts, 12 intervals last 2 workouts.
Warm up: 3 min:
Duration of work intervals: 8-12 minutes
Total time spent: 21-29 minutes.

Results: In just 2 weeks, there were significant improvements in functional exercise performance and skeletal muscle adaptations (mitochondrial biogenesis). Subjects did not report any dizziness, nausea, light headedness that is often reported with all-out intervals.

They concluded that HIIT does not have to be all-out to produce significant fitness improvements and yet the total weekly time investment could remain under 1 hour.

On a personal note, I REALLY like this kind of interval training: 60 second work intervals repeated 8-12 times. Here’s why:

Body composition was not measured in this study, but I believe that enough energy expenditure can be achieved with 20-30 minutes of this style of interval training to make significant body comp improvements in addition to all the cardiovascular conditioning improvements.

That’s another problem with super-brief and super intense high intensity interval training programs: The cardio and heart benefits are amazing, but you can only burn so many calories per minute, no matter how intensely you work. To call a 4-minute workout a “good fat burner” in the absolute sense is ridiculous.

Somewhere in between long duration slow/moderate steady state cardio and super short super-intense HIIT lies a sweet spot for fat-burning benefits… a place where intensity X duration yield an optimal total calorie expenditure at a reasonable time investment. Perhaps this 20-30 minute HIIT workout is it?

If you’ve read any of my other articles on cardio, you’ll know that I’m not against steady state cardio, walking or even light recreational exercise and miscellaneous activity as part of a fat loss program. All activity counts towards your total daily energy expenditure, and in fact, the little things often add up during the day more than you would imagine (just look up N.E.A.T. and see what you find).

But for your formal “cardio training” sessions, if you’re going to use traditional cardio modes (stationary cycle, etc.) and if your goal includes fat burning, and if your time is limited, then this type of high intensity interval training is a great choice and you can now say it is research proven…

Not to mention… the excuse, “I don’t have enough time” has been officially busted!

Train hard and expect success!

Tom Venuto, author of
Burn The Fat Feed The Muscle

Founder CEO of
Burn The Fat Inner Circle