8 Ways to Leave Fat and a Bear Behind

You most likely hate running on a treadmill. Unless you’re completely insane and love to stare into space while patiently waiting for 45-60 minutes to pass…jump off the hamster wheel and power up your cardio routine! This will also literally save your life if you ever come across a bear… disclaimer: I recommend never testing this theory.

I’m talking about conventional or traditional cardio: jumping on any piece of cardio equipment for long periods of time. This is a huge waste of time if you want to jerk off, bend over, lose fat, or take your shirt off and flex it for your friends. Now, you might think:

“But bro, why do all the gyms spend enough money on cardio equipment to finance a third world country? And they have these really nice fat loss charts that tell me what heart rate zone I need to hit to burn fat at maximum?”

No fucking idea. Well, I do, but that’s not important for this article. Let’s just say that the fitness industry has some deep-seated issues when it comes to recommending what’s best for getting the body of a Spartan soldier or the silhouette of a Greek goddess. Don’t panic, by the end of this article you’ll know exactly what you need to do to help accelerate your fitness goals and kick some butt.

So if I’m going to convince you to stop wasting 45-90 minutes of your day on conventional cardio, what’s the alternative I recommend? Well, it’s literally the exact opposite: anaerobic training, which would be an exercise that you can’t do for more than 2 minutes. This is popularized as High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), which includes: Metabolic Training, Speed ​​Interval Training (SIT), Metabolic Conditioning (METCON), and Circuit Training, all of which can replace that tedious cardio routine of the that you need to convince yourself every day. not to give up All these styles have a main theme: alternating between periods of high intensity (high heart rate) with short rest/recovery periods. While all of the above examples would be relevant to this article, to keep things simple, we’ll use running interval training (SIT, a form of high-intensity interval training) as our example, which, by our definition, will alternate between a run of running followed by a rest period, say 30:30 (30 seconds of running followed by 30 seconds of recovery). I’m going to show you why this type of training will boost your cardiovascular routine and skyrocket your results!

First, let’s take a look at the fitness benefits of anaerobic training relative to steady-state cardio. Here are 8 reasons high-intensity interval training eliminates the monotonous 45-minute run on the treadmill (which could easily be reason 1).

1) Muscle Preservation/Growth: HIIT/SIT not only preserves muscle mass, it increases it! Have you ever fantasized about looking great naked? Then you need to understand that muscle is your best friend due to its aesthetic appeal and fat-burning qualities.

2) Melt fat: The moment you get off the treadmill after a 45-minute run, you stop burning calories. High-intensity interval training allows you to burn calories, primarily from your fat stores, for up to 48 hours after your workout. DAAAAAMN that’s effective.

3) It tests all of your energy systems – while every physical activity is a combination of all of your energy systems – the ratios change depending on the intensity. Steady-state activity primarily taxes your aerobic or oxidative system. This is the system you use when you’re lazing around, scratching your back, walking in circles, staring at the wall. Please tell me if you need to improve on any of these things. If so, then monotonous treadmill running is your exercise of choice! On the opposite end of the spectrum, SIT tests all of your energy systems like a rabid dog on steroids, specifically your anaerobic pathways (ATP and glycolytic metabolism). And literally all you need is a total of 3 minutes of work to reap the benefits. Well, son of B! 3 minutes sounds a heck of a lot better than 45 minutes to me.

4) Type II Fast Twitch Fibers – Fast Twitch fibers are designed for speed, power, strength, and explosiveness! Sounds fun, right? Training these chumps is a must for both the everyday John Doe and the most elite athletes. High Intensity Interval Training like SIT primarily targets fast twitch fibers, unless you are an athlete, competitor, or know the weight room, you are probably not training these fibers effectively, which are most conducive to muscle growth, so go ahead if you want to be a skinny, sexy machine.

5) Hormonal response (protein synthesis, adaptation, inefficiency, physiological) – for your body to adapt you need a stimulus that causes adaptation. Sorry, but monotonous cardio isn’t strenuous enough to force your body to adapt the way you want it to. Sure, you will increase your aerobic capacity, capillary density, lactic tolerance, etc. All of this is great, but SIT will do all of this and a whole lot more. HIIT literally forces your body to say “WTF!” He goes into crazy mode and NEEDS to adapt, he has no choice: he is a man of science, survival of the fittest or something. The hormonal response produced from these high-intensity intervals triggers protein synthesis (muscle growth) and fat-burning mechanisms, which is beneficial to you.

6) Range of motion – we will cover this in part two. But I want you to find a freeze frame of a runner and a freeze frame of a sprinter (at the end of his stride). I’ll let you decide which individual has a greater range of motion.

7) Metabolic: We have mentioned this in point 2. The scientific community calls it COPD. But you’ve probably heard it coined like a few other terms: the afterburn effect, fat melting, fat burning furnace, oxygen debt, rage in a cage (I’ve decided this sounds super badass and may need MT ). So whatever broscience jargon you want to use, it’s still synonymous with excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) and it’s directly related to your heart rate. The more your heart rate increases during your workout, the more oxygen you’ll consume after your workout. This means your heart rate and metabolism will be elevated for hours after an anaerobic workout to help pay off the “oxygen debt” consumed during the workout. Again, this does wonders for our body composition.

8) Saving time: I could be wrong, but in my opinion, 20 minutes of high-intensity interval training seems faster than running for 45 minutes on a treadmill.

I have decided that this is enough for this article. I’ll be posting part 2 in a few days, where I’ll look at the functionality of steady-state cardio versus HIIT. What do I mean when I say functionality?… Damn, that’s another fitness fad that’s become so popular that no one really knows what it means anymore, so I guess I’ll post another article to explain where I stand on the functional training. it is.

Take-home message: anaerobic training, like high-intensity intervals, is boss, tedious non-stop cardio isn’t boss.

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