Interval training is king of the cardio session. Nothing makes me feel more dread then a boring steady state session, endlessly pounding the pavement, pushing on the pedals or pulling on the handle of a rower.
I do believe that there is a place for steady state cardio and many people say that they get into a transcendant state whilst performing it. Well, I guess that's one way to get through it. But, for me, when I do a high intensity interval session, I feel very much with it, focused, determined, eager, excited, relishing in the pain of lactic acid build up.
If all this sounds a little bit masochistic then I guess it is. Your pain intolerance will improve when you subject yourself to regular HIIT sessions and so will your fitness, massively.
Many times I've heard people say that they hover around 60 - 65% of there maximum heart rate because they believe they are working in the fat burning zone. As a matter of fact they are, but this approach is short changing them. They have been misled to believe that this is the best way to lose fat and it's usually because the diagram on the machines console tell's them so.
It is true, if you exercise at a heart of 60 - 65 % of your maximum, then a high percentage of the calories you burn will come from fat, say 60% with the rest coming from glycogen. However because you are exercising at a relatively low intensity, your overall calorie burn will also be low. Basically if you train for half an hour and burn 250 calories total and 60% of this is from fat, that's a total of 150 calories from fat. If, during a HIIT session you burn 500 calories and of these only 40% are from fat, that equates to 200 calories from fat.
This isn't the only benefit however. Once you achieve a reasonable state of fitness, training at 60% heart rate isn't going to make you any fitter. You become one of the many thousands of gym rats doing endless cardio that only maintains an average level of fitness and never increases it. This may be fine for some people and some reading this may think, 'so what, I'm fit, what's wrong with maintaining it', well, nothing, if you want to have a mediocre level of fitness.
If on the other hand you want to be super fit, the solution is High Intensity Interval Training.
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