When it comes to shedding unwanted pounds and reworking your fat-to-muscle ratio, high intensity interval training (HIIT) combined with intermittent fasting is the most effective strategy I know of.
Both of these strategies effectively boost your body’s fat burning capabilities; together they virtually force your body to shed fat. HIIT workouts have been shown to burn more calories than traditional workouts, and burns more body fat in less time.
According to the American College of Sports Medicine, HIIT workouts tend to burn anywhere from 6-15 percent more calories compared to other workouts, thanks to the calories you burn after you exercise.
Improvements in Glucose Tolerance Restricted to HIIT
The superior effectiveness of HIIT has been confirmed by an ever-rising number of studies. In one of the latest studies looking at high intensity exercise for weight loss, 300 obese individuals were divided into three groups that exercised five times a week, doing either:
- Low amounts (just over 30 minutes per session) of low-intensity exercise
- High amounts (just under one hour/session) of low-intensity exercise
- High amounts (40 minutes/session) of high-intensity exercise
A control group was included, in which no one exercised. (It’s worth noting that the high intensity group was doing quite a bit more than I and other HIIT experts recommend. Recovery becomes more important when you do HIIT, and I strongly believe 40 minutes five times a week is highly counterproductive for most.)
At the end of six months, all three groups of exercisers saw similar reductions in weight and waist circumference. On the whole, those who exercised had lost five to six percent of their body weight at the end of the study, equating to a four to five centimeter reduction in waist circumference.
However, those who exercised at high intensity experienced a nine percent improvement in glucose tolerance. Neither of the two low intensity exercise groups saw any significant improvement in glucose tolerance. In fact, they remained on par with the control group, which did not exercise at all.
This is a noteworthy difference, as normalizing your glucose and insulin levels by optimizing insulin receptor sensitivity is one of the most important benefits of exercise, considering the fact that insulin resistance is a factor in most chronic disease, including diabetes and heart disease.
Intense Exercise Also Produces Genetic Changes That Promote Fat Loss
High intensity exercise appears to produce its benefits via a number of different mechanisms. It’s quite likely we’ve not even identified all of them as of yet.
For example, a study published in the journal Cell Metabolism5 in 2012, showed that when healthy but inactive people exercise intensely but briefly, it produces an immediate change in their DNA—some of which specifically promotes fat burning.
As it turns out, intense exercise causes structural and chemical alterations to the DNA molecules within your muscles, and this contraction-induced gene activation leads to the genetic reprogramming of muscle for strength.
But other genes affected by intense exercise are genes involved in fat metabolism. Specifically, this study suggests that when you do high intensity exercises, your body nearly immediately experiences genetic activation that increases the production of fat-busting proteins.
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