Flip Your Body's Fat-Burning Switch - teach body that storing fat is ineffecient - short bursts of exercise

Flip Your Body's Fat-Burning Switch

Truth is, I have had more success with my patients by using a single exercise strategy than I've seen with all the dieting and supplement strategies combined. If you're a regular ETR reader, you've heard me talk about this strategy before: Exercise in short bursts. By exercising this way, you can burn fat for up to 24 hours after you finish. Even while you sleep.

This type of exercise teaches your body that storing energy as fat is inefficient. Fat is a low-energy, slow-release fuel. It's not good for providing you with quick high energy. So if you don't exert yourself long enough to make good use of your stored fat during your actual exercise routine, your body gives it up afterward, during the recovery period.

You can use any number of exercises to turn your body into an automatic fat burner. The only rule is that the activity has to use enough muscle mass to challenge the rate at which you're using energy. I like bicycling and swimming, because they're low-impact and don't have as much risk of injuries as high-impact exercises like jogging. What you choose will depend on your level of fitness.

Here's how to get started:

Perform a light warm-up and stretch before each exercise session.
Begin with 20 minutes every other day. (This averages to only 10 minutes per day.)
Exercise at an easy pace at first, and increase it gradually.
As your fitness improves, increase the intensity of each session.
After a few weeks, break each session into two short bursts of exercise - two six-minute sets separated by six minutes of focused recovery at a gentle easy pace.
Eventually, you can go with even briefer episodes of gradually increasing intensity.

The most common error people make is assuming you must work at a higher level of perceived exertion to get results. This is not true. The point is to start with what is a comfortable level of exertion for you. Then, as that level of activity gets easier, you focus on increasing the level or resistance of the activity rather than the duration.