I came across an interesting method of exercise, believe it or not, through a promotional ad that I got through my email. I was going to delete it, but I figured I’d open it up and see what it was all about and if it was worth any investment of time or even money if it sounded like something I might want to try. I have to admit, I’m very curious about it since it involves something that I’ve come to believe has been incredibly effective for me changing my body composition, and that is short, intense bursts of exercise.
I told you before that my husband lost around 30 pounds and I lost around 15 pounds when we started doing the short bursts of activity that were extremely intense in nature but never lasted more than 25 minutes or so, rather than slogging away at the gym for an hour or more, and what really clinched it for me was the fact that the short bursts of intense exercise that lasted about 20-25 minutes really didn’t seem to put my appetite into overdrive, like long bouts of cardio can sometimes do to me.
I remember leaving the gym at work after long periods of cardio on the elliptical (40 minutes or more) and feeling totally famished, and wanting to eat a house. Of course, I still believe that the elliptical is an amazingly effective piece of equipment, but with this new theory, you can switch between the elliptical and other intense movements for less time and still burn tons of fat.
I guess that the PACE method is very similar in thought process to this, and research has shown that people who use this PACE method of working out actually burned more fat off their bodies than those who did long cardio. Although an important point is that the long cardio group burned more calories, but not as much fat. I think the fat burning piece is more important personally, because you can always replace calories, but fat is harder to burn off.
The PACE method is never supposed to last more than 20 minutes per day, and can supposedly be as short as 12 minutes with amazing results. Does it really work? I don’t know, I haven’t tried it, but I do believe the basic theory behind it because I have seen this similar theory at work in my own experience.