Are you too busy or too tired to exercise regularly?
Have you exercised and found it “didn’t make a difference”?
Do you feel like you need to do increasingly more exercise to stay in shape?
Well, here’s an important news flash: more and longer cardio does not work! It can even make you fatter. High intensity exercise of short duration is better for cardiovascular fitness, fat burning, and hormone response than low intensity continuous exercise. What that means is that working out REALLY INTENSELY for just a few minutes, to metabolic and muscle failure, is more effective than working out an hour a day. This is “burst training” and the research is impressive on its effectiveness. And as someone who has gone from exercising an hour or more a day in the past, to an hour a week, and lost fat, weight and dress sizes doing so, I am happy to share my experience and enthusiasm as well as the research. Many of my clients have had the same significant results, even without dramatic dietary changes or other exercise.
(If you’re ready to start doing Burst Training, go right to the link for the Xiser here. It’s a unique portable stepper, and the absolute best, most efficient way to do high intensity interval training. You can use it just 4 minutes a day, 3x a week, and burn more fat immediately, and really rev your metabolism for continuous and increasing fat burning over time.) If you need to know more, please keep reading.
When we exercise for long periods of time, our body perceives it as stress, and we are flooded with cortisol. Cortisol is a “breaking-down” hormone that contributes to aging, and tells the body to store fat. The longer we exercise, the greater the catabolic, or breaking-down effect - this is not good! But here’s the good news: when we do short bursts of high intensity training, our body produces a tiny bit of cortisol but it also produces human growth hormone and testosterone, a perfect hormonal cocktail that has a favorable effect on our metabolism. In fact, a mere 60 seconds is an optimal time to exercise at high intensity. Yup, just one minute maximizes calorie burning, beta-endorphin levels, HGH, and several other markers of fat burning and muscle building. Furthermore, when we exercise like this - anaerobically - we also increase our aerobic capacity and our oxygen capacity (V02). The reverse is not true. In other words, increasing our aerobic capacity does not increase our anaerobic or VO2 capacity.
5 MORE Reasons to Burst:
The loss of muscle mass associated with aging is primarily associated with Type II muscle fiber, and only high intensity exercise utilizes it significantly.
Immune system function is improved by bursting, but decreased by long-duration exercise.
HDL, the good kind of cholesterol, shows much better improvement with bursting compared to long duration exercise, as do blood pressure and waist circumference, significant indicators of cardiovascular health.
In Menopause, our ability to increase human growth hormone and testosterone is blunted. So if you are in peri-menopause or menopause, short burst high intensity exercise is perfect for you. It can boost libido, help build lean muscle and get rid of the fat that just seems to keep adding on incrementally. In fact, burst training is anti-aging for both men and women, and can be done safely and effectively at any age, regardless of condition or exercise experience.
Short burst exercise actually retrains our bodies to recover from the biochemical effects of chronic stress, as long as we train at our highest intensity, and allow ourselves to rest in-between bursts. Rest can be a few minutes, a few hours, or a couple of days, but it is critical to give the body the opportunity to recover and rebuild. Doing this teaches the nervous system how to adapt to stress in the way we were meant to, because it’s exercise in a form that is more natural to us. We wouldn’t likely be running from a saber tooth tiger for an hour, would we? We’d either be dinner, or we’d be safe. Short bursts are the way our bodies were designed to work, and when we work with nature, the benefits are significant.
Bursts are so easy to incorporate into your daily routine, and you will find the results very gratifying very quickly. Order the Xiser here.
Sussman Holistic Services, Inc. 29 Goshen Rd Chester NY 10918 845-496-0385
