There are MANY ways to do cardio to burn fat and all of them have their place at certain times for certain people…..
HIIT is sprints or burst training, are also known as High Intensity Interval Training or HIIT for short. It can be a great way to get cardiovascular conditioning and burn a lot of calories in a very time efficient manner.
Interval training is active recovery (like walking) and then exercise (like a jog/run) in equal periods or equal bursts.
Base training is keeping the heart rate as low as possible during exercise.
Tabata training is 4 minutes of an exercise – 20 seconds on / 10 seconds off.
Furthermore, a paper published recently in the ACSM’s Exercise and Sport Sciences Review, discussed the research suggesting that intense aerobic interval training provides greater benefits for the heart than low or moderate intensity exercise.
The benefits discussed included:
- Increased maximal oxygen uptake
- Improved heart muscle contractile function
- Improved heart muscle calcium handling
- reduced cardiac dysfunction in metabolic syndrome
- Reversed pathological cardiac hypertrophy
- Increased physiological hypertrophy of the heart muscle
- Overall: improved quality of life and length of life by avoiding fatal heart attacks.
But what HIIT advocates often fail to mention is that this is NOT evidence AGAINST steady state or endurance cardio, it is evidence in favor of intense cardio.
Here at thebodycamp.com, we like HIIT and intense types of cardio – but also believe in base/tabata and interval training – variety is the spice of life!
There were people promoting HIIT long before thebodycamp.com. It’s not any revolutionary idea – people just keep putting new names and spins on it for marketing.
Many of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models for example use slow base training, steady state cardio exclusively prior to competitions and they got ripped, right down to the six pack abs.
In fact, many natural bodybuilders opt for low intensity cardio specifically for muscle retention when they get to the tail end of contest prep, where body fat stores are getting low and food intake is low. Adding too much HIIT on top of all the weight training can be risky in that caloric deficit situation and burn away good looking muscle.
HIIT and other types of intense cardio are great. It’s time efficient, making it ideal for the busy person, and it’s very effective for both fat loss and cardiovascular conditioning. It’s also more engaging, as many people find longer, slower sessions of cardio boring.
If you have a history of heart disease or you smoke like a chimney and at the same time you decide to take up running marathons several times a year, take caution.
But, “Aerobics is going to kill you!”??? FALSE!
This is perfect marketing hook for a cultish “HIIT is the only way” type of program…
Bottom line: sure, do your HIIT, do your sprints, do your Tabatas….
OR…
Do your regular steady state aerobics or base running too…
Or, do a little bit of everything, like we do here at thebodycamp.com in Ibiza, Spain.
If hypertrophy and strength are your primary goals, then make sure weight training is your foremost training priority and then during fat loss phases, add whatever type of cardio you enjoy and whatever type gets you the best results without compromising your lean body mass. But if you like to run, then go RUN, and tell the “experts” who say otherwise, to GO AWAY and take their sensationalistic journalism and marketing with them!
Rick Parcell
Europe’s No 1 Master Coach
Partner and Program Creator
Some concepts have been sourced from www.success.com and this website is definitely worth looking at.