High Intensity Interval Training

Once a week, I do exercise that could be considered "cardio." It gets my heart pumping. But unlike a traditional cardio workout, where you perform low to moderate intensity activity throughout the workout, HIIT training has periods of rest.

The basic structure of a HIIT workout is a warmup followed by intervals of intense exercise and intervals of rest.

I walk down to my local park. It's about a 5 minute walk, and that counts as my warmup. Then I run sprints across the length of the park. I have never been much of a runner, and I still wouldn't say I'm fast, but when I sprint I give it everything I've got. I try to pretend that a bear is chasing me. Or that my baby is on the other end and a bad guy is going to get him if I don't hurry across that field. Or that I'm in a race and this is the last 30 yards to the finish line. It's that kind of a run. Totally. Intense. Focused. Running.
I walk back to where I started and catch my breath. The first two times, I always think, "Why did I think this was so hard last time? This isn't so bad." By the fourth time, I'm starting to remember why I thought it was so hard. And after the 6th time, I can't run back right away. I have to catch my breath a little longer before heading out for another intense sprint. I do this 6 to 10 times in a row and I walk back home.

The reason HIIT training works is that your body doesn't "get used" to it. Just like with progressively adding more difficult weights, you progressively add more challenges with HIIT training- either by making your rest intervals shorter and your intensity intervals longer, or by lengthening the total time of the workout.

Here are some ideas of exercises to perform doing HIIT training:
sprints or hill sprints
jump roping
biking
swimming
plyometrics

Add your own ideas for HIIT in the comments below!

Kat at Body Incredible has some great thoughts on HIIT if you'd like to learn more.

Weight Lifting for weight loss

In my last post I talked about why I think cardio is less effective for weight loss. Still. I do believe in exercise, and in the next three posts I will cover exercises that I believe ARE effective: heavy weightlifting, HIIT and yoga

Weight lifting. I learned about heavy weightlifting from Jen, personal trainer friend. I was already lifting weights, but she taught me a whole new concept. Instead of lifting 8 or 10 or even 15 pound dumbbells over and over and over, she taught me to lift heavy weights with less reps (repetitions). When she introduced me to this concept, I was used to teaching the S.E.T. (Strength Endurance Training) class at 24 hour fitness. We would lift weights for 3 minutes straight (followed by 3 minutes of cardio endurance). I would use about 20 pounds when I was squating for 3 minutes. With Jen's help, I worked up to squating 105 pounds-- and I definitely don't do it for 3 minutes straight!

The whole point of weight training is to tear muscle fibers so you can rebuild a stronger muscle. These tiny muscle tears happen when you add resistance-- or in other words, it has to keep getting harder!
When I was lifting a lighter weight over and over and over, I was working my heart, I was sweating, but after a while, my muscles got used to that kind of a workout. I wouldn't even get sore! With heavy weightlifting, I am always sore afterward, if I do it right. That's because I progressively add weight, or add a few more repetitions.

Weightlifting builds muscle. The more muscle you have the more calories you burn, even at rest. Or in other words, more muscle means a faster metabolism. That's what we're going for, right? Building muscle turns our bodies into calorie-burning machines.
When I was teaching aerobics, people would always ask me which burned more calories: cardio or weightlifting. The answer I would give was that cardio burned more calories during the hour you were doing it (usually not by a huge margin), but weightlifting burned calories while you were doing it and kept on burning calories afterward to feed the muscle you just built.

Weight lifting increases your metabolism because you force your body to build more muscle.

If you have never lifted weights before, it would be a great idea to have a personal trainer, or someone at the gym show you how. You want to make sure your form is correct so that you don't injure yourself. If you have done a little weight lifting in the past, here is a very basic workout that works all your major muscle groups and can be done in about 20 minutes. This is the workout that I always come back to if I'm in a hurry. It works the largest muscles in your body, making it efficient AND effective.

Warm up:
Squat (with no weights), 5 reps.
Chest Press with 5 lb. dumbbells, 5 reps.
Bent over row with 5 lb. dumbbells, 5 reps.

Workout:
When doing heavy weightlifting, you want to try to lift at a weight that you can maintain for 10-15 reps. If you can do more than 15 reps, your weight is too light. If you can't get to 10, take some weight off.

Squat with barbell., 10- 15 reps.
Chest Press with barbell, 10-15 reps.
Bent over row with barbell or heavy dumbbells, 10-15 reps each side.

Repeat this workout 2-3 times.

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays.

Former Aerobics Instructor is Now anti-Cardio

I went to a Jazzercise class last week with some friends. Jazzercise is basically aerobics, but each song has its own choreography. It was a lot of fun, and quite similar to what I used to do as an aerobics instructor. But it was interesting listening to them, and doing all this cardio when... I don't believe in it.

Let me just say first of all, that moving your body is good. Doing jazzercise, or aerobics, or jogging does keep your heart pumping and makes you feel good. But for weight loss (the reason most people exercise), I believe cardio is the least effective form of exercise.
Here are the reasons why I no longer believe in cardio:

It's not as simple as "calories in, calories out."  The instructors at my class today reminded us of how many calories we were burning. ("One class can burn up to 600 calories, ladies!")  But scientific studies have shown that cardiovascular exercise makes you hungrier. Your body wants to replace those lost calories. Basically, with cardio, you are fighting your body to lose weight. Dr. Stephan Guyenet uses a great analogy that helped me to visualize this. (You can listen to the entire podcast here.)  He said that losing weight by doing cardio is like having the a/c on in your house. But when it gets too cool and you want to warm it up a bit, you open the front door. Well, you know what happens then, right? The air conditioner works hard to cool the house, requiring more energy. With cardio, you are burning more calories (working harder), so your body will crave more calories for energy too.
If "calories in, calories out" worked, then you would exercise (calories out) and eat less (calories in). But that is missing one very simple physiological process: hunger. You can only fight your body's hunger signals for so long.

Cardio can do harm to joints and cause overuse injuries. During the weight portion of the class, we worked very specific small muscle groups over and over and over. Jumping and running definitely have their place in an exercise regimen, but all you have to do is look at the number of runners with bad knees to know that overuse injuries occur. Often.

Your body adapts to cardio. This means that doing the same exercise becomes less effective over time. Your body adapts to the exercise--  that's why it gets easier. Your body is becoming more efficient at the exercise. Good for the body, but bad for weight loss. That means that to do exactly the same exercise, you will be burning less calories after a month than you were when you started.

So maybe you know someone who started doing cardiovascular exercise and lost a lot of weight. Maybe you know a lot of people who have done that. But what if it wasn't the exercise at all?  What if, like my instructor said today, "after I've done a class, I don't want to go eat that cheeseburger. I worked so hard to burn those calories, I don't want to put them back in."  Maybe cardio exercise changes our psyche more than our figure, causing us to make other changes, like in what we eat. Or maybe, when we start working out, we are burning so many calories that our body has a hard time replacing them all through food. But as time goes on, and our bodies adapt, we burn less calories and our exercise is less effective at helping us lose weight.

Coming up: In my next post I will detail what I believe in instead of cardio and how to work with your body to lose weight.