For years, it was common knowledge that you had to stay in the target heart rate zone to efficiently burn fat. However, the last few years have seen a rise in the popularity of shorter, intense cardio workouts to burn fat.

Training in your target heart rate zone came about when it was revealed that lower intensity exercise (like walking) burns a greater percentage of fat calories during the activity. More intense work on the other hand burns predominantly carbohydrates. So people would try not to train too hard, because if they did, their body would switch from burning fat, to burning carbohydrates. What most people don’t realise though is that you cannot rely on calories burnt during an activity to lose weight.

Calories burnt during the activity do little to help us lose fat. The critical component of successful fat loss relies on our metabolism and certain hormones flowing through our body. This is why shorter more intense workouts are much more efficient.

Training at a lower intensity burns calories only during the activity. As soon as you stop you will stop burning calories. This is because this form of training hardly raises your metabolism. Also longer, less intense cardio sessions hardly stimulate our body to release hormones which will help our fat loss progress. If done long enough though, you can actually stimulate a hormone that works against us…cortisol. Cortisol is a catabolic hormone which actually eats away at muscle. This is obviously a bad thing!

On the other hand, shorter, more intense cardio workouts release certain hormones, most importantly Growth Hormone. The amazing thing about growth hormone is that it helps us build muscle, and does its best to stop fat from storing on our body. We could eat as much as we want and we won’t put on any fat. (However if you got an absolutely voracious appetite, you might, at worst very slowly put on some fat.) That’s why if we got the hormones flowing in abundance in our body, an occasional pig out day, or binge isn’t going to hurt our progress.

Another great benefit of intense training is that it raises our metabolism substantially, for up to 48-72 hours afterwards. Seeing how it keeps the metabolism elevated for up to 3 days afterwards, imagine what would happen if you did these cardio workouts every other day. Your metabolism would be like a fat destroying furnace!

A good real world example is to compare the difference in physiques between marathon runners and sprinters. Which physique would you prefer? How do you think they train? Marathon runners do hours upon hours of long distance running, whereas sprinters train intensely and explosively. No matter what training we do, our body works by adapting to the stress and making it easier.

So with all the training marathon runners do, cortisol will be running rampant in the body, destroying muscle. This is simply the body adjusting to the workload and making it easier for itself. Too much muscle will only hinder the athlete’s performance (and joints mind you!). That’s why marathon runners have very little muscle.

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