I LOVE the benefits of exercise, but I’d be lying if I said that I loved TO exercise. I always feel better afterwards, but I can’t say that I TRULY enjoy it. That’s why when I exercise (and I do so 5-6 times per week) I want to get the most out of it, in the shortest period of time.

Two main objectives in my fitness program are to 1) burn fat, and 2) build muscle.  I am not a body builder, so my goal isn’t to get HUGE, but I am striving for a lean stomach and well-defined muscles.  Both are important, not merely to look good, but to be healthy read this for more info.  We know that even 10-15 pounds of extra abdominal fat can have tremendous health consequences, and we know that lean muscle mass is the one of (if not THE) most consistent biomarker for overall longevity.

I want the body of a soccer player.  I don’t want to look like a long-distance runner, and I don’t want to look like Conan the Barbarian.  To me, soccer players, sprinters, and swimmers have the most desirable physiques.  I would have included basketball players to the list if I weren’t 5’5″.

So, what do these sports have in common?  Their sports involve short bursts of intense exercise, followed by periods of rest.  A soccer player races at full speed towards the ball, then typically has a period of walking or jogging while the ball is elsewhere.  The sprinter goes as fast as he can for a short distance, then walks.  Basketball has bursts of intense exercise, with periods of less intensity, or rest.

This is all in direct contrast to other forms of exercise where one spends hours upon hours walking or jogging, either on the street or treadmill. Please don’t misunderstand, all exercise has the potential for good, but not all forms of exercise yields the same results.  It’s important to know what your goal is to determine of your exercise program is right for achieving your goals.

Here’s a question to consider: would you rather burn fat for 24 minutes, or 24-48 hours? The answer seems obvious, so here’s what you need to know:  When you perform mild to moderate exercise (for instance, walking or jogging), your body burns up stored sugar in your muscles for about the first 20 minutes, then switches to burning fat.  That’s good, but when you are done with your workout, your body goes back to burning sugar, so if you spent 40 minutes walking or jogging on the treadmill, you would, in theory, burn sugar for 20 minutes and fat for 20 minutes, then go back to burning sugar.  That’s good, but not great.

How would you like to trigger a hormonal response in your body that would cause a continued fat burn for the next 24-48 hours? That’s what happens when you perform shorter bursts of intense exercise, like the sprinter or soccer player (I’m sure you can come up with numerous other examples of  sports with similar characteristics)

What I recommend for my patients and clients is for them to perform High Intensity Interval Training (or H.I.I.T).  High Intensity Interval Training goes by other names, such as Burst Training (see my friend Dr. Josh Axe’s new Burst Fit videos), Surge Training, or Tabata intervals.  These are all variations on the same theme of performing exercise at top speed or intensity, then resting for a brief period of time.  This causes your heart rate to go way up, then come down….then go up!…..and down…..and up!….and down…..you get the point.

The cool thing about H.I.I.T is that it can be performed with little to no equipment, and it can be done nearly anywhere.  It can easily be done in your living or bedroom, in a gym, on a track, in the pool – anywhere you can perform an exercise that gets your heart rate up high, then allows it to come down.

The sky is the limit on the actual exercises you perform.  You could sprint, swim, swing a kettle bell, do push-ups, jumping jacks, ride a spin bike, do mountain climbers, burpees, or literally hundreds of different things. The key is to perform the exercise at high intensity (ideally, you can’t carry on a conversation) for a period of perhaps 20-45 seconds, then rest for 10-20 seconds.

Here are a few examples of intervals:

• 30 second sprint/30 second walk/30 second sprint/30 second walk/30 second sprint/2 minute walk  This would be one “cycle” and I might suggest doing 3-5 cycles.  The sprint exercises could be performed on a track, the road, on a bike, or other piece of equipment
• 40 second sprint/20 second rest, or 45/15
• 20 second sprint/10 second rest.  This is called a Tabata interval, named after a Japanese doctor.  It’s amazing how much can be accomplished in merely 4 minutes using the Tabata method.  A four-minute Tabata routine would consist of 8 20-second bursts of exercise with 10 second recovery periods.  I like to do this routine on my Schwinn Air-dynne bike because it allows me to exercise my entire body very quickly.  Sometimes I will perform a double Tabata by performing these intervals for 8 minutes.

The main take away from this article is that we want to optimize our fat-burning benefits, in the shortest period of time, and by performing short bursts of high intensity intervals, with short periods of rest, we cause the heart rate to go up, and down, and up and down, and that’s good for triggering fat-burning hormones such as testosterone, growth hormone, and adrenalin.  These hormones can trigger the body to burn fat for up to 48 hours and that’s what we want in order to maximize our fat-burning while minimizing the amount of time exercising.