It seems that more and more evidence is mounting that the best way to burn fat and keep muscle on the body while getting rid of body fat is to do a regimen at least a few times a week where you are getting short bursts of extremely physical, hard activity, followed by short recovery periods.  I had first talked about this a few months ago when my husband and I began doing circuit training which used this principle, and we both lost a lot of weight for working out for only about 25 minutes to a half hour.

It truly did seem that this short burst of activity was working better for us than the consistent activity we had performed in our home gym, say on our elliptical machine, or at the gym outside of home on the treadmill. The typical gym session for me consists of about a half hour of pure, consistent cardio, not anything really intense, but constant moving on a treadmill, recumbent bike or elliptical machine, followed by weight work and floor work like abs and pushups to tone my muscles.

Turns out that I could have gotten a lot more out of this time by making sure I was alternative really hard, agressive and explosive movements, by periods of recovery.

Findings now are pointing to the fact that this type of exercise, where you do really hard activity for thirty seconds, until you feel like you literally couldn’t do a second more, it’s so taxing, then you follow it up with 90 seconds of recovery where you are going at a normal pace (not slow, but still working out), then go on your thirty second round again with intensity, and do this for about twenty minutes until you’ve completed around 9 cycles or more, you will get much more out of it.

Your body apparently works more of something called “white muscle” which burns fat and calories much more intensely than the other muscles of your body. This white muscle really kicks it into high gear when your body is extremely taxed. So you are working this on and off for the whole time, burning that fat and getting a deeper, more effective workout, building endurance and burning several more calories and fat.

I tried this on the recumbent bike at my work gym a few times, and believe me, you are sweating a LOT more than if you did a regular half hour on the thing!  I was sweating my butt off after 15 minutes, whereas it normally takes me a little longer to do that when I’m on the bike.