HIIT vs Traditional Moderate Cardio Routines
Extract from Taylor Wests Fat Burning Blueprint.
You may have heard that you need to perform aerobic exercise for at least 30 minutes to begin burning fat, hence doing higher intensity but shorter exercises may sound counterproductive?
Well, remember that the benefits of HIIT go way beyond the calories burned during the exercise. When you do it correctly, HIIT is scientifically proven to boost your resting metabolic rate and enable your body to burn more calories and fat at 10% – 25% harder for up to 48 hours after the workout, hence the cumulative fat burn is much greater than traditional cardio exercise.
For example, let’s say you burn 330 calories from running at a moderate pace for 30 minutes. Your calories stop burning immediately after the exercise is over; your cumulative caloric burn is 300 calories. Not bad, but not great either.
In the same 30-minute time frame, if you perform a variety of HIIT workouts you will burn 500 calories. At this point, the difference is only 150 calories. However, your body will continue to consume more calories at an elevated rate for up to 48 hours afterward, giving you another bonus 400 calories. Your cumulative calories burned are actually 900 calories—almost triple the calories burned from doing a moderate aerobic exercise.
HIIT is also known to substantially lower insulin resistance and enhance improved glucose tolerance, making your body store less fat from whatever food you eat.
Once again, your metabolism works 24/7; therefore, a much more effective way for long-term fat burn is to reprogram your metabolism with the right diet plan and high-intensity workouts. As a result, you are literally transforming your body into a 24/7 fat-burning machine!
Calorie Counting
Quote from Lyle McDonald author of: The RAPID FAT LOSS HANDBOOK (A Scientific Approach to Crash Dieting) – he was right when he wrote it and nothing has changed! No links to buy it here – if you want it you will easy find it.
“The bottom line is this, no matter what I or anybody else says about it, people are going to crash diet. Sometimes it’s necessary or beneficial, other times it’s not. Regardless, people are going to do it. With that realization made, I figure that the least that can be done is to make sure that such crash diets are done as safely and as intelligently as possible. Using nutritional science and research, we can develop a crash diet that isn’t totally stupid, that will be safe and sane (within the limits of crash dieting) at least compared to everything else that’s out there.
Trust me, there’s a lot of really dumb ways to lose weight fast out there. All vegetables, all fruit, nothing but broth, that cabbage soup thing, just a lot of stupid, stupid shit. This book isn’t such an approach. It relies on cutting edge nutritional science to ensure that rapid weight/fat loss is accomplished as effectively and safely as possible. I’d be lying if I said it was an easy diet, but it is an effective one.”
Whilst I like both of these books, and would recommend you use both (not at the same time!), of the 2 I am a little more confident of the science and research behind Lyles. I have yet to find any research to confirm Taylor Wests figures for afterburn.