Fat Loss Wars

Fat Loss Wars: Slow Cardio vs Interval Training

Most personal trainers are dead wrong about recommending cardio workouts for fat loss. Not only do they take too much time from your busy schedule, but they simply just don抰 work as well as trainers hope, and sometimes they just don抰 work at all.

It抯 time for an all-out fat loss war between slow cardio and interval training. Your success depends on the outcome of this battle. So let抯 get started. First shot goes to cardio.

If cardio worked best for !a href="http://www.turbulencetraining.com/fat-burning/index.shtml" target="_blank" title="Fat Burning">fat burning, then science would be full of amazing fat loss results from exercise studies. But a quick look at the latest research shows that cardio fails where most trainers would expect it to succeed.

Here抯 one of the biggest cardio exercise failures I抳e stumbled across in the past three years. It was a big study done in the United States, and was published in a prestigious research journal suitably named, 揙besity?

In the study, male and female subjects did one hour of cardio per day for six days per week, and this went on for an entire year. Do a little math and you抣l see that these poor folks had to do 300 hours of cardio. I can only hope they something to read as we all know how boring cardio is.

Now if your personal trainer recommended you do 300 hours or even just a year抯 worth of cardio, they抎 likely promise that you could lose 10, 20, 30 pounds of more, right? But what did this study show?

Well, frankly, the results were pathetic. Cardio workouts failed big time. The subjects lost an average of 5 pounds after 300 hours of cardio. That means you抎 have to do 60 hours of cardio ?the equivalent of one and half work weeks ?just to lose one pound.

What a complete and utter waste of time. If that抯 the best that cardio can do, then this war is going to be over faster than you can say, 揷ardio sucks? Let抯 see what weapons interval training has to bring.

Researchers from the University of Guelph put women on an interval training program and found that after the training program, they were able to burn more fat at all levels of exercise. Other research suggests that interval training can boost metabolism for hours after exercise, although to be fair, this is a controversial area that requires more research.

It抯 not looking good for cardio, but the only way to settle this fight is to let cardio go head-to-head against interval training. And in fact, this battle has already happened twice.

The first study pitted steady-state slow cardio against interval training and the results were published over 15 years ago. The Canadian researchers found that interval training helped the young men and women subjects lose more fat in less time than cardio.

This should have been enough to make cardio retreat and surrender, but the mass media and mainstream fitness magazines just didn抰 get the message, no matter how many articles and programs I wrote for them (and those were published in Men抯 Health, Oxygen, Men抯 Fitness, and even Prevention magazine).

Finally, the second epic battle between cardio and interval training happened in Australia. Researchers put one group of women on a 40-minute, slow cardio workout and compared them to a second group of women on a 20-minute, interval training workout. Both groups exercised three times per week.

The results were completely one-sided. Interval training trounced cardio, with the women in the interval training group losing significantly more belly fat than the cardio group. Cardio has surrendered.

These days, everyone is talking about interval training. More men and women are finally getting results in less workout time because they are giving up cardio and switching to short, burst workouts. And if you want fast fat burning results, that抯 what you should do.

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