If you're like me, you gather up lots of extra fat for the wintertime (kind of like a bear getting ready for hibernation). And after January or so, the weight that you wrote down on your internet dating profile last autumn starts to feel less like an exaggeration and more like an outright lie. Then, the moment it starts to get a little warmer outside, our winter fat becomes far more of a burden than it is during the winter months. Jeans and sweats get tossed in the closet in favor of skirts and shorts. Arms are freed to see the light of day.
And unfortunately, most of what you're showing is probably a little wider and more jiggly than it was last autumn.
There aren't many "get thin quick" gimmicks that actually work. Short of starving yourself or spending 12 hours a day on the treadmill, you have to expect anything you do to improve your body to work slowly. However, there are some exercise regimens that work faster than others. And one of the best of them is interval training.
How Interval Training Works
Interval training is the process of working at high and low intensities during a single workout. This kind of exercise works the aerobic and anaerobic systems, (which is what makes it incredibly effective). During the high intensity portions, your anaerobic system works hard to store energy in your muscles-- the actions of the anaerobic system don't use oxygen, but create lactic acid (which is why your muscles burn when you're working hard). During the low intensity phase, the aerobic system works to help you recover all the oxygen you lost when you were working so hard, and it converts all those carbs (read: your daily donut) into the energy you're using up.
Benefits to Interval Training
It all sounds rather technical, right? Fortunately, you don't need a medical degree to understand how all of this "aerobic-this" and "anaerobic-that" affects your body.
Here's an example of how interval training works. If you were to take a brisk walk to burn off that chicken salad you ate for lunch, you might normally walk a consistent 3.5 miles an hour. But if you substitute about half of your walk with short spurts of 4.5 miles an hour, you'll burn far more calories than just sticking to your easier 3.5 mph. In fact, you'll generally burn around 30 perfect more. The same standard holds true for any kind of exercise, such as switching between jogging and sprinting.
The difference in the calorie burn between regular exercise and interval exercise make for far greater weigh loss as time passes. It also helps to strengthen the heart and lungs more effectively than traditional exercise.
Interval training is also a good way to burn more calories in a shorter amount of time. If working harder during 50% of your workout burns 30% more calories, it generally means you can work out 30% less time than you would during a normal workout.
Interval Exercise Examples
Interval training can be incorporated into just about any kind of workout. Some workouts --especially classes and workout DVDs, but also treadmills and other equipment-- have interval training built right into the workout in order to increase your calorie burn. With other workouts, however, you'll need to adapt them to interval training on your own. To adapt your workout, you simply need to create intervals of higher and lower intensity within it, called sprint intervals and rest intervals.
In general your sprint intervals will be measured by time; depending on what kind of training you're doing, those intervals can be very short (just 15 seconds) or quite long (about 20 minutes). During these periods of high intensity, you should be working very hard.
The rest intervals in a workout are also measured by time. A rest interval isn't actually a rest --you don't stop working out-- but a period of lower intensity. The period of rest interval to sprint interval changes from workout to workout, but for most workouts the rest period is generally about 50% longer than the sprint period.
If you're not a big fan of working out, doing interval training can feel like you're pushing your body very, very hard. But no other exercise out there can provide the body with the same effect or let it burn the same number of calories. And, sure, you're working hard... but when you're finished with your workout 10 minutes earlier than you would be otherwise, you'll be the first one to thank yourself for working so hard.
