Originally published August 15 2005
Kicking up your cardio may aid in more fat loss
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
High-intensity interval training is suggested for people to take their workout up a notch, as it forces your body to expend energy throughout the day in order to recover from the workout you just received.
So you've finally added enough muscle to your body and now you only have to get rid of that extra layer of "padding" that seems to have crept on as well.
You see it whenever you look in the mirror: the dreaded excess body fat that has accumulated as a result of a little too much food in the past few months during your quest for muscle mass.
HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) is essentially cardio performed at such an intense level that your body will spend the rest of the day expending energy to recover from the ass-kicking you gave it.
This is commonly referred to as EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) and means that you consume a great deal more oxygen recovering from the exercise bout than you would have, had you just done a steady-state workout.
This means that you will be burning up to nine times more fat while sitting on the couch later that night than you would have if you had spent an hour on the treadmill at a moderate pace.
The reason for this is that there are two types of muscle fibers in your body: fast twitch and slow twitch.
Slow twitch fibers are more compatible with endurance training (such as a steady-state one-hour run), whereas fast twitch fibers are more compatible with short, intense bouts of exercise (such as weightlifting or sprinting).
The sprinter is composed of fast twitch muscles and carries a great deal more muscle mass, whereas the marathoner has a lot of thin, slow twitch muscle fibers and his body tries to become as light as possible so that it is easier to transport across those great distances.
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