Byron Knows Best- The Real Route to Fat Loss

In today’s instalment of #ByronKnowsBest I want to talk about high intensity interval training (HIIT) and fat loss. Now, I appreciate fat loss is a hugely expansive topic covering many areas, so today I’ll break it down to basics and  leave you with some tips on how, with HIIT, you can become a fat burning machine.

High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is an enhanced form of interval training, an exercise strategy alternating periods of short intense exercise with less-intense recovery periods. Typically my HIIT sessions vary between 5 and 25 minutes depending on the overall intensity of the session. These short, intense workouts provide greater athletic capacity and condition, more efficient glucose metabolism, and improved fat burning. 

In order for me to explain why HIIT is, in my opinion, superior for fat loss over other options, I need to give you a quick science lesson on why we store excess body fat.

The Science Bit

If you’re a gym goer, statistically, you're not currently exercising at the optimum level for fat loss. I know this from experience. Walk onto any gym floor right now and the vast majority of the clientele are on a treadmill or cross trainer for 45-60 minutes watching those calories tick along on the screen. The reason is, as everybody knows, fat loss is a simple calories in, calories out equation right? It’s common knowledge if you burn more than you eat, you lose tonnes of fat?! I hate to break it to you but it absolutely doesn’t work like that. If you walked on a treadmill for an hour and the dessert you treated yourself to last night was now ‘free’, you’d starve to death walking out of reception – our bodies just aren’t that efficient. (as a side note – when the exercise equipment asks you for your height and weight, it works out your basal metabolic rate, which is the amount of calories you would burn just standing still. It then adds a percentage to that for the work rate throughout the exercise. So when it tells you you’ve burned 500 calories because of the exercise, realistically it’s more like 40. I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you!)

So how does it work? It all becomes much clearer when you realise that fat loss depends almost entirely on achieving the right internal hormonal environment and very little to do with calorie restriction. And I can prove it. When people with the same diet and exercise programme go through a hormonal change in their late 40s/early 50s, they find it harder and harder to lose fat. And I’d be a rich man if I had a pound for the amount of times clients have told me they’re on a low calorie diet and they just aren’t losing any weight (or they lose a little then put it all back on again).  Creating this environment is achieved in two ways. Firstly by leaning towards a diet which is permissive for fat loss (coming in the next instalment of #ByronKnowsBest) and with high intensity exercise. 

Why should I choose HIIT?

This adrenaline producing, quick style of training is the polar opposite to what you see 90% of gym goers doing, and I’ll share the secret as to why it works so well.

Your muscle cells burn energy in two ways, aerobically (with oxygen) and anaerobically (without oxygen) and here’s the difference

• Aerobic exercise – Steady state treadmill walking or light resistance training 
• Anaerobic exercise – Flat out sprinting or throwing a heavy weight overhead

Put simply, the fastest and most effective way to deplete the cell of all of its glucose is to train anaerobically. The reason these workouts are short (sometimes only 4 minutes) is you only have a limited amount of glucose present to train at that intensity, and once it’s gone, it’s gone. Taking muscles or muscle groups to depletion is a proven way of directly decreasing insulin resistance, which in turn improves on the way your body deals with calories thereafter. So it’s not so much, how much you eat, rather how your body deals with the energy once you’ve consumed the calories.

As if that’s not enough, HIIT also causes what’s known in the fitness world as the afterburn effect. Put simply it keeps your body releasing energy and burning calories long after you’ve left the gym,  opposed to the steady state alternative where you only use energy when performing the activity. It’s something to think about when you’re watching T.V after a good session!

HIIT training is also an attractive prospect to those of us with a busy schedule. It has revolutionised personal trainers, because now the - “I just haven’t got the time” excuse, just won’t wash. I mean who can’t find 5 minutes?! And within that 5 minutes you’ll get a workout which guarantees fat loss results – something you 

weren't getting before. And come on, who wants to stand on a treadmill for an hour?!