Too good to be true? It sure sounds like it!!
But what if it isn't??
When you walk into any commercial gym in the country, you are bound to see the cardio machines lining the walls. For decades, we’ve been told that for weight loss, you must do cardio, ALL the cardio.
However, more recently, as the overall pace of life has increased there has been a big shift toward HIIT training (High Intensity Interval Training) as the most efficient and effective form of cardiorespiratory training. Fitness centers and fitness professionals all over have begun telling their clientele they don’t need to keep doing long, boring cardio sessions, and instead they are recommending short sessions of HIIT training. When it’s first explained, it’s easy to see how it falls into the “new shiny object syndrome” You mean I can do LESS cardio and burn MORE calories?! Sign me up!! Who wouldn’t want to do that? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple! Calories yes… but where those calories are coming from (or which energy system is being used) is where this logic gets muddy.
I certainly won't argue that HIIT training has benefits and serves a good purpose, but if your goal or purpose for a particular cardio session is to progressively burn off more and more of your fat stores with each session, those HIIT training sessions may not do it for you! In addition, true HIIT training puts a lot of stress on your body and you need to allow enough time for recovery before jumping into another HIIT session.
Due to such flawed logic, people have begun to train too hard during their cardio sessions and are doing it too often, hoping to burn fat quickly by pushing themselves as hard as possible. This leads to burn out, injury, lack of results, etc. So if YOUR purpose is to decrease fat in an effort to change your body composition (or essentially your shape rather than just your size), bring the intensity down and increase the length of working time.
Heart rate training expert and PhD, Declan Connolly says,
Check out this Men's Health article
featuring commentary by
Declan Connolly, PhD and Bryant Walrod, MD.
In addition, the study linked below demonstrates that continuous aerobic exercise training is effective in improving body fat distribution even in the absence of weight loss. However, high intensity interval training did not prove effective in improving body fat distribution.
Thus, we can infer that longer low intensity cardio sessions, like walking, will indeed result in true fat loss, even in stubborn areas like visceral fat stores (fat stored in the abdomen around your organs)!
Want even more evidence to back this up?!
No problem!!
Another study also concluded that, "Daily walking rather than improvement of exercise capacity correlated with the reduction of visceral adipose tissue."
SO... How do you know just the right intensity for you?
Download the PDF below
References
1. Keating, Shelley E et al. “Continuous exercise but not high intensity interval training improves fat distribution in overweight adults” Journal of obesity vol. 2014 (2014): 834865.
2. Miyatake, N, et al. “Daily Walking Reduces Visceral Adipose Tissue Areas and Improves Insulin Resistance in Japanese Obese Subjects.” Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports., U.S. National Library of Medicine, Nov. 2002, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12213351.
3. Wildenradt, Reegan von. “You Need To Start Adding Heart Rate Training To Your Workouts.” Men's Health, Men's Health, 23 Apr. 2018, www.menshealth.com/fitness/a19871099/heart-rate-training-workouts/.
*The resources and links listed are only suggested as sources for further exploration. They do not necessarily imply endorsement.
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