Fat burning secrets

Burning fat? Keep it short but intense.

If losing weight is one of your exercise goals, forget working out in your fat-burning zone - it's not the best way to chew up calories.

It's about 20 years since "fat-burning zone" entered the language of fitness. It sprang from the fact that when you exercise at high intensity, you burn more carbohydrates as fuel in relation to fat - but when you work out at an easier pace, you burn more fat in relation to carbs. It was the news we all wanted to hear - you could sweat less, but offload more fat. But what the theory overlooked was that although you burned more fat as fuel, the overall amount of calories burnt was less than if you moved at a faster rate.

Take someone who's walking for an hour and someone who's running for an hour - 70 to 80 per cent of the fuel that the walker burns will be fat, but the total number of calories burned will be less than the calories burned by the runner. But the bottom line is that the fitter you are and more intensely you work out, the more efficient your body is at burning fat.

Don't let the word "intensely" scare you.

Intensity is relative to where you are. There's no point in going so hard that you collapse in a heap after five minutes - what's important is to keep up an intensity that you can cope with.

To decide what's intense for you, use the rate of perceived exertion, which is simpler than it sounds. If you imagine an exertion scale of 10, with number one being barely moving and number 10 being the point of collapse, then what's moderately intense for you would be around five or six.

This moderate pace is a good level for doing most of a cardio work out - walking, running, cycling, rowing or indoor machines.

But once you're more experienced, don't be afraid to increase the intensity.
Alternating bursts of speed with your moderate pace boosts your fitness without having to work at an uncomfortably high level for too long.

Walking for three minutes at level five, for example, then speeding up for a minute until you're moving at level eight, before dropping back down to five, and so on.

Besides helping to burn more calories, interval training, as it's called, can also help to burn more fat.

Research from the University of NSW compared two groups of women - one exercised at a steady pace for 40 minutes, while the other exercised for 20 minutes, but followed a cycle of eight seconds' sprinting with 12 seconds at a slower rate. The result? The women in the interval training group lost three times as much fat as the women who worked out for longer.

HOW TO GET MORE OUT OF A WORKOUT
- Only 20 or 30 minutes to spare? Adding bursts of speed will make a short workout more effective.
- Use interval training with any cardio exercise: walking, running, cycling, rowing or swimming.
- Boost the intensity of a walk by including hills and steps.
- The best workout includes a mix of cardio exercise for fitness and strength training to build muscle - if you have more muscle you burn more calories

To Your Success!