Fitness Tip - How to burn body fat

Despite popular belief 'Long Slow Distance' training is not necessarily the most effective way to burn fat. This type of training is designed to keep your heart rate at around 60% of it's maximum for the duration of the training. But to burn any serious fat, you need to keep going for a substantial amount of time, usually around 45 to 60 minutes. This can often be detrimental to most peoples fat loss goals, because after a certain amount of time you are also burning muscle for energy, which is not good. As you know muscle, is calorie hungry and is necessary to help maximize fat loss.
Most people find this kind of time frame very hard to stick to, because it can be quite tedious and time consuming. By the time you have included a warm up, cool down and stretching session you are looking at well over an hour just for your CV session before you have even started with your resistance session.

A much more efficient way of burning fat and conserving time is to increase the intensity of your workout by adding interval sessions. This also helps to preserve muscle because the workout sessions are often considerably shorter and you are using a combination of different energy systems for fuel.

Interval training involves structured periods of work and recovery time and is aimed at developing cardiovascular fitness and improving your tolerance of training at higher intensities.

Fartlek training (Fartlek is the Swedish term for 'speed play') is another form of interval training, but instead of the interval being structured, the work and rest periods are random.

Fat burning, is accelerated by increasing the intensity of your workout. By intensity, I mean working harder, this will mean increasing your heart rate to around 80 - 90% of its maximum for a shorter period. This will ensure that you burn more calories in a shorter time period. The other advantage of interval training is that it relieves the boredom of just plodding along at the same old speed, which means your workout becomes more enjoyable and challenging.

You can apply interval training to almost any type of CV exercise, but it's important that you work hard on the work portions of the interval to get your heart rate up so that you are burning more calories and using fat for fuel as well as carbohydrate. You need to push yourself beyond your comfort zone. As you get fitter you can begin to decrease the rest interval and increase the work interval. This will quickly and effectively teach your body to adapt to new training conditions and catapult your fitness levels and fat burning ability into new territories.