Winston Salem Fitness

Tired of that stubborn roll of stomach fat that won’t go away, no matter how little you eat and how long you exercise? Frustrated with your grueling, yet ineffective, workouts that do little for your abs, but nonetheless gobble down precious hours of your day?
If you’ve just about given up on your dream of sculpting rock-hard, chiseled abs – don’t. Abdominal fat tops the list of just about every fitness enthusiast’s ‘trouble areas’, given that these fatty pounds are the easiest to pile on, and the toughest to lose. However, toning your abdominal muscles isn’t such an uphill task as it seems at first blush. More often than not, the problem not in the fat itself, per se, but in the techniques you implement to get rid of it.
The first and biggest fallacy that most fitness novices harbor about losing stomach fat is that weight loss is the very same thing as fat loss. In keeping with this theory, the lesser you eat and the more you exercise, the more weight and hence, more fat you lose. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, it is this very reasoning that is responsible for that stubborn spare tire around your midriff, your low energy levels and mounting frustration with your body. When planning your ab-fitness workout, pay attention to this single thumb rule – “Less is More”. Simply put, this rule means that rather than stretch your workout over ever-increasing amounts of time, what you need to focus on is burning more calories without spending any more time at the gym than you already do.
How do you go about doing this?
The simplest and most effective way to pack more punch into your everyday workout is to swap your low to moderate intensity exercises with Interval Training.
What is Interval Training?
Interval Training is a technique that was first devised to help elite athletes enhance their strength, endurance and hence, overall performance. This technique alternates spurts of intense activity with intervals of a low-intensity exercise to boost your fitness levels, spike your metabolism and hence, burn more abdominal fat.
How is Intensity Measured?
The intensity of an activity is measured on a 10-point scale, where an intensity of 1 denotes the amount of energy you use when standing still, 5 represents the extent to which you exert yourself during a light jog, and 10 is a vigorous sprint.
A typical interval training session combines high intensity and low intensity exercises in the ratio 1:2 in terms of time. This means that every unit of high intensity exercise is immediately followed by a round of low or moderate intensity exercise which lasts for twice the amount of time as the high intensity exercise. These intervals of low or moderately intense activities help your body recover sufficiently from the stress caused by the high intensity exercise, and are hence termed as recovery intervals.
Why is Interval Training more effective than an hour of moderately-paced cardio?
Prolonged stretches of low to moderately intense cardio workouts, which were hitherto believed to be the most effective in terms of the amount of fat they burnt, can actually do your body a lot more harm than good. Over time, these workouts weaken your joints, hamper the functioning of your immune system, and can even bring about a pro-inflammatory response which eventually leads to chronic disease. In the short term, long and slow aerobic training is as futile as it is frustrating, simply because your body adapts to these exercises. And so, even as you slog away your ‘one-hour of slow jogging a day followed by a hundred crunches’ routine, your body has already devised more efficient ways of coping with this enhanced need for energy and thus burns lesser and lesser number of calories with every passing day.
High intensity exercise, on the other hand, burns a lot more calories per minute of exercise as compared to low intensity activities, and also goes on to boost your metabolism, so that you continue to burn calories for hours after your workout. And so, when you swap your low to moderate intensity workout with a high intensity routine, you burn a lot more calories, and hence fat, than you would with your regular workout.
The downside to high intensity exercises is that they can over-stress your body if your muscles don’t have enough time to recuperate and are too fatigued. In fact, if your muscles are unable to cope with the exertion, they begin to display signs of micro-trauma or microscopic tears in their fiber membranes and protein filaments.
With Interval Training however, your body receives the best of both high intensity and low intensity exercises. While the spurts of high intensity exercise rev up your metabolism and crank up the rate at which your body burns fat, the intervals of low calorie exercise help your muscles recuperate enough from the high intensity training to overcome any negative impact these exercises may have. Interval training also improves your cardiovascular health over time, so that you can gradually keep increasing the intensity of your workouts without having to keep increasing the duration of your workouts as your body adapts to the exercise.
Why do you need interval training at all? Can’t you just do a few abdominal exercises every day?
Contrary to what you may have been led to believe, no exercise – no matter how strenuous – can coax your body into losing weight from one specific location. Further, even if you do manage to strengthen only your abdominal muscles, you still won’t be able to flaunt the perfect set of six-pack abs… simply because your muscles will be buried under a thick layer of fat!
In addition to a targeted workout that enhances the strength and tone of your abdominal muscles, it is important that you incorporate at least three sessions of Interval Training in your exercise routine so that you strip away the unwanted flab around your midriff to reveal taut, toned muscles.
Getting Started:
To help you get started on your journey from flab to fab, here’s a quick interval training workout that you can do even if you don’t have any fitness equipment or a subscription to a fancy gym.
Warm Up: 5 minutes Start with a brisk walk, building up to a moderate jog.
Step One: 30 seconds Sprint as fast as you can.
Step Two: 2 minutes Slow down to a moderately-paced jog, or brisk walk.
Repeat Step One and Step Two 6-8 times.
Cool Down: 10 minutes Reduce your pace to a slow walk.
As you build strength and endurance, increase the duration of your high intensity interval (Step Two) to 30 – 40 seconds. Push yourself as hard as you can to attain maximum intensity during the high intensity intervals to burn the maximum number of calories and thus, the most amount of fat.
If you aren’t really a running person, never fear. Interval Training can easily be incorporated into any kind of cardiovascular exercise that you enjoy the most. So, if you like biking, start at a pace you are moderately comfortable with, and then crank up the intensity so that you really have to push your body to accomplish the exercise.
Interval Training is a welcome change from the hours of monotony that were almost synonymous with cardiovascular workouts. This pattern of exercise offers you new challenges and allows you to experiment with virtually every form of exercise, while significantly boosting your overall fitness levels and tearing away at your abdominal fat.
That said, skip the hamster-on-a-treadmill routine today and make the move to interval training… you’ll be surprised at how quick and enjoyable fat-loss can really be!
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