Fooled by Cardio? Here's the Better Way

Aerobics are a waste of time. You can burn fat and improve your health without cardio. Long, slow to moderate intensity cardio training, which is what you see most people still doing in the gym, is not really the best way to shed fat.

Interval training, which is periods of short hard exercise followed by short periods of recovery, works better for fat loss, according to both Canadian and Australian researchers (plus hundreds of advanced trainers throughout the world).

An interval might last 30 seconds to 60 seconds, and it would be hard work, harder than normal cardio. Each work interval is followed by 30 to 90 seconds of very easy pace. So if you're running on a treadmill you might run at 7 mph for your work interval and then go all the way down to 3 mph for a walk for your rest. That's what we use instead of slow cardio. All it takes is 20 minutes of interval training to get better results than 40 or 60 minutes of slow cardio.

Now the research and experience is showing that the intervals not only as effective, but it's even more effective in most cases. And also you're doing fewer repetitions. So, you know, every time you run we'll count that as repetitions, so if you run for 60 minutes you're looking at maybe 3,000, 4,000 repetitions in a slow cardio workout where you're doing probably one-third of that or even one-fifth of that in interval workout.

And that leads to less overuse injuries and that's one of the big problems with long slow cardio is that a lot of people end up in the physiotherapy office getting some type of therapy for their overuse injuries. Runners are in there all the time getting their injuries looked after.

So, we're trying to cut back on the volume of work, cutting back on the quantity and focusing on the quality. And like I said, we started off just by doing it to save time and now we're also finding out that we're actually getting more results.

Pick from a big variety of interval methods. It doesn't just have to be running on a treadmill. Clients have started to incorporate a lot of jump rope intervals, which jump rope can be very intense, so I think that's a great, you know, just think of ways that you can make things fun and things that you may enjoy doing.

You might not enjoy running, so find something that you do enjoy doing like jump roping or maybe getting on a stationary bike, but do it, make it real intense for a shorter period of time, then back up that intensity and do a interval type workout and I think you're going to have fun doing it.

To me it's more fun than walking for an hour on a treadmill and you're going to get more benefit out of it and it's going to take a less amount of time. Less amount of workout time, better results, and more fun. You're looking at probably at least a dozen different ways you can do interval training. Sports are intervals. And again that's more fun. You can also do biking or rowing. There's all types of traditional cardio machine that can be used.

We also use sometimes kettlebells and we also use body weight circuits, which are not really interval training but they're not strength training and they're definitely not cardio, but we find that body weight circuits are beneficial in a whole bunch of different ways.

They like interval training to help burn calories and lose body fat, but also because most people are doing exactly what we're doing right now, which is sitting in a chair all day, they're either driving or they're at work and they're in that one posture. Then they get in an elliptical machine and it's not much different.

Don't get stuck in a rut. Move your body.

So there's a whole lot to be said for the body weight circuit training. You can definitely find some of my circuit training videos on YouTube, will give you lots of ideas, but basically what we do there is we generally will take an upper body exercise and a lower body exercise or a whole bunch of them and we'll alternate between upper and lower. Maybe we'll do six or eight exercises in a circuit, take a minute rest, and then go through that again.

Twenty minutes of that, it goes by a lot faster. Interval training goes by a lot faster than regular cardio. Cardio is slow and boring. Bodyweight training is not. Interval training is over fast.

So what we're really trying to do is show people that there's so many other options to getting a better body than what they've read in the muscle magazines or Shape Magazine for the last 20 years since the 1980s that you have to do an hour of circuit training with machines and then an hour on the cardio machine.

That's not a great way to live life and it's not the best way to get results, especially when you look at the body in terms of everything from not only how it looks but also how it moves with the mobility.

And these days were just so immobile in our daily lives that we need to get more movement patterns into our training sessions. And again it's more variety and a lot more fun. So drop the slow cardio and do some type of fat burning interval training to lose belly fat.

Use fast fat burning workouts with bodyweight exercises and interval training