To Lose Fat Fast Which is Better - HIIT vs Cardio
Everybody wants to lose
fat fast. They want to drop weight quickly and exercise is certainly a
good add-on to make that happen but which is better?
Should you do high-intensity interval training or should
you do steady-state cardio?
So, first of all, I want to remind everybody why we really
exercise it's for brain activation, hormone balance, improved circulation,
anti-aging benefits, better physical fitness, and a better quality of life.
HIIT is high-intensity interval training and high-intensity
means you get your heart rate up above 90 percent of your maximum. If you're
not really fit, you don't want to start where you want to work your way up to
that and interval training. Simply means we have short bursts of intense
activity mixed with periods of rest and recovery. When the intensity is that
high then we can only keep it up for seconds people often mean the same thing
when they talk about cardio or aerobics and what this means is we have a medium intensity it is a lot slower than the 90 percent somewhere around 70 percent.
How do lose weight fast in 2weeks?
Some people can push it up a little bit more and often times
we talk about cardio as a steady-state so if you did something like a spin in the class even though you might have variations you might have higher or lower
intensity within the workout you're not having longer periods of complete
recovery like we do in the high intensity because it is a lower intensity or a medium
intensity.
So which one is better for fat loss well it depends. So if
you're 40 years old as an example then your maximum heart rate would be 220
minus your age or 180, then you just put in whatever age you have and you come
up with a number and that's a good rule of thumb it's not going to be exact. You
might be 10 or 15 or 20 points higher or lower but it will give you a good idea,
then your heart rate, your full range of possible heart rates would be all the way
from resting up to maximum heart rate and you would be on a continuum from
aerobic to anaerobic.
Aerobic means that you are doing the exercise with air that
you're breathing and the oxygen provided is enough to completely burn the fuel
and provide energy for the activity. When you have a more intense activity then
the oxygen is no longer enough, you can't breathe fast enough to supply all of
the energy needed and then you switch into the anaerobic range. This is where it's really kind of ironic that
people call it aerobics but in effect, it's aerobic so the thing that we
refer to as steady-state cardio or aerobics.
Some examples of these different activity levels.
The aerobic activity would include walking, slow biking, and rollerblading. So as long as you did these at a moderate pace without huffing and
puffing they would be purely aerobic but you could also do any of these at a faster
pace. If you push yourself and you walk faster or bike faster now you could
turn them into an aerobic activity and also anything that you typically go to a
class for like a step class or a spin class etc would qualify for anaerobic.
High-intensity interval training is things like sprints or
running up the stairs in a stadium or doing burpees activities.
The two sources of fuel the body has and how they change
depending on activity if you do a low-intensity aerobic activity you'll be
using mostly fat and that's especially true. If your fat adapted or if you are
carb dependent or if you are recently had a lot of starch or sugar then you're
going to shift that balance toward the glucose but an aerobic activity is still
primarily a fat-burning activity. Now once we get into cardio or aerobics which
like we said actually anaerobic things are going to change but sometimes we're
a little sloppy with language and we say that the body switches from burning
fat to burning carbs and that's not really what happens. Because we're still going
to maintain our basic aerobic fuel burning but once we get up to our aerobic
threshold, we will get up to the limit that we can supply with oxygen. It
doesn't mean that we stop using our aerobic base it just means that we have to
add another fuel source so now we still burn the fat but we have to burn more
glucose in addition so glucose becomes the dominant fuel and the same thing
obviously holds true for high-intensity interval training.
The more intense it is the more glucose we have to add on the
faster. We have to burn through the glucose so that glucose becomes even more
dominant but fat is still there as the aerobic base.
Types of exercise that will
impact the Hormones.
Hormones impact fat burning or fat storing and the two hormones
in question are human growth hormone and cortisol. We think of human growth
hormone as something good and cortisol as something bad. Both of them obviously
are produced at the right time in the right amount but we want to find
something that maximizes the benefits.
So when we do aerobic training then there is a small impact
not much but it's more than if you're sitting on the couch then the more
intense the exercise becomes the more growth hormone. You get tired and you
sweat there is more potential for fitness, there is more challenge to the body
but with high intensity. When you push your limits then the growth hormone goes
through the roof, can make as much as 700% more growth hormone from even short
bursts of high-intensity training what happens to the cortisol? Well, it
also goes up accordingly but with aerobic training, there is very little need to
make more cortisol because the energy is provided from oxygen and burning fat.
We don't have to have more blood sugar to support this
activity so, therefore, there's a very small amount of cortisol produced but as
soon as we cross into that anaerobic range we need another fuel source and the body has to start making more blood sugar and obviously with HIIT. Then we're
gonna make even more because we're burning through that glucose even faster but
here's the key to understanding that the high-intensity interval training is such
short bursts of activity that we might only keep it up for two to three minutes
even if the workout lasts 5 or 10 or 15 minutes. The intense bursts only add up
to about 2 to 3 minutes so, when we multiply that by the time the total impact
is actually very small on the other hand. This size arrow has to be multiplied
by the 30-40 minutes or more that we sustained that activity and during that
long time we actually make a whole bunch of cortisol and the adrenals have to
work really hard because it's a long time to do that so if you understand this
correctly then you see that we want to optimize the human growth hormone and
minimize the cortisol.
So, both the high intensity and the aerobic training do
that but the end aerobic sustained activity doesn't do that so whether we do
this for health benefits or whether we do it for fat-burning. The outcome is
the same but it's also going to depend on who does this it's going to be more
or less beneficial or detrimental depending on who you are so in the scenario.
The people who find themselves in middle-age and them
haven't been taking care of themselves and now all of a sudden they're going to
fix everything in a short period of time so they go to the gym and they sign up
for boot and they get a personal trainer. Who's going to try to whip them into
shape this is not the right solution because typically that boot camp is
going to put them all into the end aerobic activity and they're going to stress
their body more than what is good for it and they're going actually start
breaking their body down.
High intensity and cardio probably burn similar amounts of fat during the Exercise.
You might even burn more in the cardio because it has a longer
duration but what's more important is to understand how this affects you
long term. What's happening in the days after the workout, so with
high-intensity interval training you're getting and boost in growth hormone
that even though the boost may not stay super high for days it still has a positive impact on your body for days.
Better benefits by focusing more on high intensity and low level.
Do less of the cardio but you can still get away with it you can still be
healthy, however, if you have insulin resistance and you have weak adrenals. You're
going to be pushing the cortisol beyond what you handle. If you're fit and you
have high reserves and you have some sport or event and you just love to do it
then add in a little bit of aerobics as well but still, I would put most of my
emphasis on aerobic and hit.
