On one end of the spectrum, you have the “cardio haters.” You know them as the people that believe cardio is a complete waste of time and will kill your muscles and your body. (I even saw one article go as far to say it will actually kill you. That’s a bit much.) Then there are the “cardio lovers,” they’re typically distance runners and mileage junkies that pound the pavement—or the treadmill—and feel that running is the best form of exercise. (Expect rampant “Born to Run” references.)

The truth always depends on the context. Instead of asking if cardio is good (it is, and in many forms), you should be asking a different question:

For fat loss, HIIT workouts will definitely have more bang for you buck, but lower intensity cardio still plays an important role for your health and training.

“Why am I doing cardio?”

Maybe more appropriately, “What do I hope to achieve by running?” Or what most people really want to know: will cardio speed fat loss? 

If you’re looking to burn the most fat with an efficient approach, let this article be your guide. -AB

The Cardio Fat Loss Plan

By Chris and Eric Martinez

Cardio always appears to be the solution to burning fat. That’s what runners will tell you.

Talk to someone that lifts weights and they’ll tell you to move those weights faster or to perform intense intervals.

It might sound simple, but that sums up the great cardio debate: The slower, longer steady-state approach (sometimes referred to by researchers and internet scientists as LISS) versus the shorter, high-intensity plans (HIIT).

So what’s the right cardio for you? The answer isn’t necessarily as black and white as you might think, but in less than 5 minutes we can teach you a more efficient way to burn the most fat.

The Difference between HIIT & LISS

HIIT stands for High-Intensity Interval Training, which consists of short sprint intervals coupled with low-moderate intensity work. An example of this would be a 10 to 30-second sprint followed by a 3 to 5-minute steady pace walk to cool down and bring your heart rate back to normal and then repeating it.

LISS stands for Low-Intensity Steady State cardio, which consists of low-to-moderate intensity work. An example would be walking on the treadmill or riding the bike while holding a conversation. (We tend to see a lot of this at commercial gyms.)

The Burn: What You Really Want

We love science and as complicated as it might seem sometimes, researchers have made it increasingly easy for us to figure out exactly how we should be spending our time in the gym. You see, two tests, in particular, paint an interesting picture: lactate threshold (LT) and anaerobic threshold (AT). The LT and AT are extremely powerful predictors of performance in aerobic exercise (cardio).

There are 2 ways your muscles can burn glucose (blood sugars): aerobic (with air) and anaerobic (without air). For example, long bouts of LISS cardio are considered aerobic work, while weight training or HIIT cardio can be classified as anaerobic work.

The AT and LT are a great test for HIIT and LIIS cardio because it provides a great predictor of which type of work produce ATP. (Adenosine Triphosphate) It’s best to think of ATP as a quick burst of energy whenever you contract your muscles. (For example, every time you do a bicep curl you receive a surge of ATP).

HIIT produces better changes in exercise capacity as opposed to LISS cardio. High-intensity training will hit the AT and LT, and that’s what causes your body to experience metabolic changes. When you are doing LISS, you are considered below the AT and LT.

Translation: When performing HIIT style workouts you’re improving your metabolism. And when that happens you can expect more fat loss over time.

Changing Your Metabolism with Cardio

Even though genetics play an important role, you can “convince” your metabolic to change…if you force it. The easiest way is to increase muscle mass and your muscle’s oxidative capacity. Your muscles have these energy-producing units called ‘mitochondria’ and this is where ATP is made and fats are burned.

The more mitochondria you have and the more active they are the greater oxidative capacity you have for fat loss. HIIT increases mitochondrial capacity and you actually increase the number of mitochondria you produce.

Studies show that you achieve greater fat loss through high-intensity training because of the increase in oxidative capacity. Whereas with LISS you’re only burning calories at that precise moment, there’s no 24-hour energy expenditure (boost in metabolism) and it hurts you down the line because your body adjusts to it and you end up needing more and more to lose fat.

In other words, when you crank up the intensity you’re actually changing your muscle’s metabolism, thereby boosting your caloric burn because you increase the mitochondria density of your muscles.

While it sounds great on paper, here’s what you must realize: HIIT isn’t a walk in the park. (Literally.) You must make your body a little uncomfortable (but not painful) because you’re pushing your body to an extreme.

Slow Cardio Is Not Bad. It’s Misunderstood

Your body is very adaptive. We tend to see a lot of people doing hours and hours a week of LISS and according to calculations they should be losing pounds, but they don’t see changes because their metabolism adjusts to low-intensity exercise.

If you do LISS all the time, you’re basically trading calories in and calories out and you can cut these same calories through diet and still get the same effects. Let’s put it another way: Say you burn 200 calories during 30 minutes of work on the treadmill.

That’s a good workout, but the caloric deficit is just 200 calories. If you wanted, you could cut out 200 calories through carbs or fat and basically get the same effect as opposed to receiving a 24-hour metabolic boost through HIIT cardio.

A study conducted by Wilson et al. from the University of Tampa, FL, found that when you add in LISS you experience a temporary boost in weight loss. Subjects lost a couple of pounds the first week and after that, they lost nothing. This happened because their metabolism completely adjusted and that became their new set point to what they had to do just to maintain.

Maybe, more importantly, the research suggested that steady-state cardio with a low-calorie diet is not ideal for fat loss and could cause muscle loss.

You see, with lower intensity cardio your metabolism becomes adjusted to the pace and you constantly have to do more and more to receive similar results. In that way, it’s almost like a drug. Your body creates tolerance and you need higher and higher doses just to create the same effect.

Even worse? Oftentimes those people doing cardio to lose fat are also on a low-calorie, low-carb diet. When this happens, your body doesn’t have much stored glycogen (the carbs you store in your muscles) so your body goes searching for other sources of energy.

One of those energizers? Protein. And when that happens, you might start tapping into your muscle stores, which isn’t exactly what you want to do on a fat loss plan.  Just to prove the point, in the same study by Wilson et al, people who did slow steady-state cardio lost more muscle than those who performed the high-intensity intervals.

Creating Your Cardio Fat Loss Plan

What does it all mean? On the surface, it might appear that you should only do high-intensity cardio, but that’s not completely accurate.

For fat loss, HIIT workouts will definitely have more bang for your buck, but lower intensity cardio also plays an important role in developing your different energy systems, helping with cardiac health, and even promoting recovery from sore muscles. We’re big believers in combining both high and low-intensity cardio. Here’s a checklist of why:

• You can’t do HIIT 5 to 6 days a week because eventually it will have a negative impact on your weight training and it’s too much stress on your central nervous system. Imagine driving your cardio at its max speed every day. The engine would burn out. Your body works in similar ways.
• Many people have legitimate orthopedic, cardiac, and even psychological reasons to avoid HIIT, so LISS is their only option
• HIIT could be dangerous if not used right and could lead to injury

There’s also another X-factor: your mind.

Some people have trouble pushing themselves to the max, and thus HIIT cardio becomes something that’s not enjoyable and not performed. It might sound like an excuse, but for anyone that’s worked with clients, it’s a real barrier. The goal is not to force action, but to instead try to offer the best solutions.

HIIT is quicker, proves to be more effective for fat loss, creates metabolic changes, improves body composition, and helps with muscle retention—but everyone can’t do it. LISS is safer, but takes twice as long to accomplish similar goals and has physiological limitations in terms of metabolic changes.

Better Fat Loss Solutions

If you’re looking for diet and fitness help, learn how you can work one-on-one with a Born Fitness coach to create your own personalized plan. Learn more here. 

READ MORE: 

Want to Burn More Calories? Add This to Your Fat Loss Plan

Why Weights are Better Than Cardio for Fat Loss

How to Lose Weight: Why Sleep Can Make You Fat

Adam Bornstein

Adam Bornstein is a New York Times bestselling author and the author of You Can’t Screw This Up. He is the founder of Born Fitness, and the co-founder of Arnold’s Pump Club (with Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Pen Name Consulting. An award-winning writer and editor, Bornstein was previously the Chief Nutrition Officer for Ladder, the Fitness and Nutrition editor for Men’s Health, Editorial Director at LIVESTRONG.com, and a columnist for SHAPE, Men’s Fitness, and Muscle & Fitness. He’s also a nutrition and fitness advisor for LeBron James, Cindy Crawford, Lindsey Vonn, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. According to The Huffington Post, Bornstein is “one of the most inspiring sources in all of health and fitness.” His work has been featured in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, Fast Company, ESPN, and GQ, and he’s appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, and E! News.

The post The Cardio Fat Loss Plan appeared first on Born Fitness.

Now, understand that the world you are looking for does exist. And it’s not hiding in some fitness Eden. It’s the same world you live in, one filled with big box gyms, cardio rooms, CrossFit boxes, mobile fitness apps, swimming pools, rowing stations, stadium steps, and every type of exercise in between.

While different fitness enthusiasts have their preferred method of burning calories (and rightfully so — a world without different opinions would be pretty boring and limit innovation), the reality is that many things work in fitness.

The biggest problem with Tabatas is that people took a great concept (higher intensity, less rest) and destroyed the execution.

The same reason people get frustrated looking for “the answer” in nutrition applies in fitness, too. There is no one answer, and there are many types of exercises that burn calories.

While any type of activity can help you burn fat, certain methods — like weight training — are more efficient than others. And while it’d be easy to tell every person to just lift some damn weights (I do it quite frequently on my blog and on Twitter), there’s one small problem: Some people don’t like lifting weights. In fact, they hate it.

No matter what they do they can’t fall in love with the iron and the challenge of pushing themselves to lift more weight, perform more reps, or do it all in less time. These people are oftentimes written off. They’re told their approach to fitness won’t work, and generally ignored and left as fitness loners.

I hate that. You see, any type of exercise can be turned into a fat burning experience. Fitness shouldn’t be a place just for those who conform. It’s a platform for those with desire to make improvement. And who am I (or anyone else) to insist that fitness must occur on my playground?

While my preference always focuses on resistance training and trying to lift heavy objects, I care much more about helping everyone become active as opposed to convincing people to do things my way. (Dear fitness industry: Please read that sentence again. And then spread the word.)

So for those of you looking for a different approach to fat loss (whether with weights or not) it’s time to take a well-known recipe for fat loss, and apply a modified version to your activity of choice.

The Tabata Method: What We Know

Some of you might have heard of Tabata Protocol. Many view this method as the holy grail of fat loss, and here’s why.

In the mid-1990s Dr. Tabata designed a study where one group of people performed “steady state” cardio for 60 minutes. This is what most people have historically considered fat loss exercise: slug away for 60 minutes at a constant pace, let the elliptical tell you that you burned a ton of calories, and then call it a day.

The other group? They just pedaled on a bike for a pathetic four minutes. (Or as long as it takes you to karaoke to “Living on a Prayer.”)

But it wasn’t any regular four minutes; the participants biked as fast as they could for 20 seconds (max effort), rested for 10 seconds, and then repeated this pattern for eight rounds until time was up.

Sure, 60 minutes of exercise versus four minutes of exercise doesn’t seem like a fair trial. And it wasn’t: The four minutes was superior to the 60 minutes in terms of overall conditioning and fat loss.

And thus began the evolution of high-intensity training and intervals. Push yourself really hard and rest less, and you can burn more fat. The concept is simple, but the execution is one that has still been hard to apply correctly. Until now.

How to Burn Fat Faster (And Why You’re Doing It Wrong)

The biggest problem with Tabatas is that people took a great concept (higher intensity, less rest) and destroyed the execution. If four minutes is great, then eight minutes must be incredible. And if eight minutes is incredible, then 16 minutes must be mind blowing.

Yet, much like many other things in life, sometimes more isn’t better. And in the case of Tabatas, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Remember, the key to Tabatas was the intensity. Push to you maximum output, rest for just enough time to keep that intensity at it’s highest, and then get back to work.

The secret of Tabatas is not just the work-to-rest ratio; it’s the fact that you can push your body to the extreme and experience supreme benefits.

Now, that’s not to say that you can’t do two or three or four rounds of Tabata style workouts. But those additional rounds might have diminishing benefits if your intensity isn’t as high, which is what happens if you maintain a 20-second exercise-to-rest ratio for long periods of time.

By round four, odds are you’ll be moving at an intensity that is far from your max. Or in other words, you take your output from being a sprint to a marathon. And in a marathon, a sprinter won’t win because he or she can’t sustain his or her intensity for the duration needed.

The solution: Manipulate the work rest ratio so that you can squeeze in a longer workouts and maintain higher intensity.

This approach is not Tabatas.

Calling every type of four-minute interval Tabatas is like labeling every type of high intensity training or Olympic lifting as “CrossFit.” (It’s not, so please stop.)

But, it is taking the Tabata concept (high intensity, low rest) and applying it in a way that you can have a short workout (12 to 20 minutes) and push yourself in a way that will deliver great results by maintaining higher intensity.

Designing Your Fat Loss Approach

Creating workouts is a science, but not all plans need to be overly complicated. Here’s a three-step approach that will start you on the right track and familiarize your body with the type of intensity you need to see results. [Note: by the rules established above, this is not the Tabata method.]

Step 1: Choose a form of exercise of your choice.

Note: It must be something that allows you to push at a very high intensity. If you choose to walk, then you must be able to run. If you want to bike, then bike harder. If you’re swimming, swim faster. And if you’re lifting weights, you’re picking a weight that you can lift for about six reps. (For other activities, I think you get the idea.)

Step 2: After a thorough warm-up follow this routine:

• 10 seconds of high intensity work.
• 30 seconds of rest or low intensity work.
• Repeat for 8 rounds (or a total of 4 minutes)

Step 3: Rest one minute and then repeat.

Follow this process for three to four total rounds, or a total of 15 to 20 minutes.

This way, you choose the activity you want, spend enough time to produce real (visible) results, and keep the workouts short enough that time is never an excuse. The result is a workout with enough rest that you can maintain a higher intensity for a longer period of time.

Best of all? You can make progress at any activity, burn fat, and not have to completely sacrifice your schedule to become fit. And while it’s just 15 to 20 minutes, if you push the pace and maintain a high intensity, you’ll be shocked by how much you can transform your body.

Personalize Your Fitness Plan

Want to work one-on-one with a coach to cater a workout plan to your goals, your lifestyle, and your schedule? Now you can. Click here to learn more about Born Fitness coaching

Adam Bornstein

Adam Bornstein is a New York Times bestselling author and the author of You Can’t Screw This Up. He is the founder of Born Fitness, and the co-founder of Arnold’s Pump Club (with Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Pen Name Consulting. An award-winning writer and editor, Bornstein was previously the Chief Nutrition Officer for Ladder, the Fitness and Nutrition editor for Men’s Health, Editorial Director at LIVESTRONG.com, and a columnist for SHAPE, Men’s Fitness, and Muscle & Fitness. He’s also a nutrition and fitness advisor for LeBron James, Cindy Crawford, Lindsey Vonn, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. According to The Huffington Post, Bornstein is “one of the most inspiring sources in all of health and fitness.” His work has been featured in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, Fast Company, ESPN, and GQ, and he’s appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, and E! News.

The post Tabata Training, Fat Loss, and the Intensity Effect appeared first on Born Fitness.

What you don’t hear enough?

How to make fat loss work for your body. Sure you might know about HIIT or interval training, but both are often abused in a way that stalls progress more than it helps. 

More is not always more, and a big part of adding fat loss finishers is to gradually increase frequency and intensity.

While exercise isn’t rocket science, it still is a science—and one that heavily depends on all of the demands you place on your body. To achieve faster fat loss, any training plan won’t do. A great workout for someone else might not work for you because of genetics, or it could just be that it doesn’t fit with the other stressors in your life.

To help you crack the personalized aspects of fat loss, I turned to Jen Sinkler, author of Lift Weights Faster 2. [Note: I have no affiliate relationship with this product and don’t receive a penny for promotion. Jen’s approach to fat loss works, but more importantly, her programming helps people find the right program for their body.]

This post will not share a new exercise or routines. But it will explain how to find the best workouts for your body (especially if you’re busy and short on time), and that is maybe the most valuable secret there is for transforming your body.

Faster Fat Loss Workouts

By Jen Sinkler

I make no bones about being a fitness eclectic — from competitive powerlifting to lifting weights faster to calisthenics to clubbell yoga, I love mixing up my workouts, testing out the new and novel, and learning from the best and brightest coaches in the biz.

I have no hard-and-fast rules about the best way or only way. There are many roads to fitness and they vary, by and large, from person to person. But I do have one general rule of thumb that I follow wholeheartedly: I train intuitively.

I’m a huge proponent of listening to my body, heeding its signals, and making adjustments to my training. That means some days, I can push hard and feel amazing.

Other times, depending on life stressors — such as increasing lack of sleep, poor nutrition, hard deadlines, or writing a e-book (ahem) — it’s important to pull back a bit (or, in some cases, a lot) on the metabolic-resistance sessions or sprint training that I love so much.

But intuitive training doesn’t only apply on a workout-by-workout basis.

As you learn your body’s natural cycles and its responses to training and other stressors, you may notice longer-term cycles of turn-it-up and dial-it-down. By making cyclical adjustments, you can make the most of your training and maximize them gains.

I’m essentially talking about naturally periodizing your metabolic-resistance sessions, or finishers, just as you might more officially periodize your main strength plan.

Lifting 101: Understanding Periodization

Periodization is a training methodology most commonly applied to strength training that divvies up workouts into week-long, month-long, and year-long cycles.

It’s an up-and-down training “map” that ratchets up the intensity for a chunk of time — generally three to six weeks — and then tones it down.

The point is to get the best results without overstraining, overtraining, and zapping yourself completely (or, for that matter, undertraining and making no progress).

While this concept is usually applied to traditional strength training, there’s no reason it can’t apply to your conditioning workouts, too. In fact, you should fully expect to go through periods of time every three to six weeks when your body needs a break. Don’t ignore that urge — use the opportunity for variety and recovery so you can come back stronger and faster in the next “up” cycle.

What does this look like in practice? For one, it doesn’t have to be anything formal. You don’t have to rigidly schedule your deloads. Instead, it’s about identifying what you’re doing, and how you can adjust your fat loss additions to accelerate results without slowing down your body or needing to spend more time in the gym.

The Fat Loss Matrix: Creating Your Plan

Fat Loss Trick #1: Go Heavy on Heavy

Make your conditioning match your main session in terms of demands placed on the body. You’re looking to tax your body in similar ways on the same day, says Alex Viada, CSCS, founder of the coaching company Complete Human Performance.

If you’re lifting heavy, focus conditioning on short, fast barn-burning sprint sessions or circuits.

The contrast allows your body the best chance to recovering from that stimulus between sessions.

This is in contrast to doing activities that impose vastly different demands — if you’d pair heavy squats with a long, slow bike ride, for example — which may impede speedy recovery.

Fat Loss Trick #2: Less Load Means More Volume

If you’re going lighter that day or doing more bodyweight or calisthenics movements in your strength sessions, then do more bodyweight circuits as finishers.

You’re always balancing two goals—fat loss and recovery. With less total load (read: not taking the “go big or go home” attitude) there’s usually less stress on your body and recovery can be quicker.

That means you don’t want to sacrifice that strategic approach by adding heavier loads for your fat loss finisher. Instead, add in more bodyweight work, but with the techniques that will make the workouts more metabolic.

Fat Loss Trick #3: Watch the Clock

If your main lifts take up a lot of time, do a short finisher with exercises that round out your workout and hit the muscles you’d like to focus on that day.

Doing a full body workout, crush a quick countdown workout of kettlebell swings and squat thrusts (think modified burpee without the pushup). Do 10 reps of both exercises, followed by 9, then 8, and work your way all the way down to 1, resting as little as possible. It doesn’t look like much on paper, but your body will feel different once you’re finished.

Even high-intensity bouts of 10 minutes or less have been shown to deliver crazy good results. This is what most people struggle to understand; up to a certain point, it’s not about how much time you spend in the gym.

Instead, it’s all about your intensity and how much work you can cram into a period of time. For the same reason that slow cardio can slow fat loss, fast cardio can speed the process.

Fat Loss Trick #4: Schedule Your Fat Loss Workouts

I generally recommend doing at least a short conditioning workout two to three times a week — some people do great with four or even five — in addition to following a more traditional strength program.

How do you know what’s right for you? Generally, start on the low end. More is not always more, and a big part of adding fat loss finishers is to gradually increase frequency, assuming that you’re not left exhausted or struggle to recover.

Remember, adding fat loss finishers should improve your overall conditioning and speed your transformation process. But the core of your program is still your main workout. So if those training sessions are struggling, then it’s best to scale back on the number of finishers you do each week.

Fat Loss Trick #5: Establish “Levels” of Difficulty

This one is simple and extremely effective, both from a physical and mental standpoint. Doing one short, one medium, and one long conditioning workout per week, can allow you to easily match up fat loss finishers on days that make sense.

Only have time for 20 minutes one day per week? Consider making that your “long” conditioning workout—but make it all that you do. Twenty minutes will never feel more effective.

Fat Loss Trick #6: Cycle Your Finishers

Do only short conditioning workouts (10 minutes or less) for one week, followed by a medium-length conditioning week (20-ish minutes), and then a week of longer (in the 30-minute-or-above range). Then, repeat the three-week cycle — as long as you feel physically, mentally, and energetically awesome.

What’s The Right Plan for You?

The truth is, the following variables will impact how you respond to fat loss finishers:

• your fitness level
• other activities
• time
• stress
• injuries

All of these will all affect what you can handle. “Too much” and “too little” are relative concepts, not just from person to person but for you, personally, on a daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly basis.

However often you lift weights faster, the important thing is to adapt as necessary. Start small and then build big. Try one of the fat loss tricks, add it to your workout, and then test for at least 2 weeks before reassessing. If it’s working, either stick to the plan or add another wrinkle.

Even though lifting weights faster is one of the most effective ways to speed up results, fat loss is not a race.

Push the intensity and be patient, and the results will be worth the process.

READ MORE: 

Why Weights are Better Than Cardio for Fat Loss

Are Toned Arms Genetic? (And Why Arm Workouts for Women are Flawed)

The Abs Workout: How to Transform Your Midsection

Adam Bornstein

Adam Bornstein is a New York Times bestselling author and the author of You Can’t Screw This Up. He is the founder of Born Fitness, and the co-founder of Arnold’s Pump Club (with Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Pen Name Consulting. An award-winning writer and editor, Bornstein was previously the Chief Nutrition Officer for Ladder, the Fitness and Nutrition editor for Men’s Health, Editorial Director at LIVESTRONG.com, and a columnist for SHAPE, Men’s Fitness, and Muscle & Fitness. He’s also a nutrition and fitness advisor for LeBron James, Cindy Crawford, Lindsey Vonn, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. According to The Huffington Post, Bornstein is “one of the most inspiring sources in all of health and fitness.” His work has been featured in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, Fast Company, ESPN, and GQ, and he’s appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, and E! News.

The post Faster Fat Loss: How to Add Workout Finishers appeared first on Born Fitness.