HIIT or miss!

Hi All,

Going to check in with diet diary but thought I'd also let you know what else has been going on.

Today I got an e-mail from a lady who's blog I read and it was very interesting. Steph Rice is in the fitness industry and was talking about people exercising but not achieving great results because they are not working out efficiently.

Many people do long sessions of cardio (40 mins plus) but although this is great in many ways it isn't the most effective for fat burning. Steph explains that although these burn fat while we are doing them this increase stops shortly afterward while other exercises keep the flame turned up for much longer (some studies suggest up to 24 hours). Here is the link so you can read her article and follow her blog if you wish
http://thesexyflatstomachsolution.blogspot.com/

This kind of exercise is called HIIT or High Intensity Interval Training. It can incorporate a range of exercises but basically consists of a warm up period followed by bursts of exercise at about 90% capacity followed by a period of about double the length recovering. This is repeated usually 8 times or more followed by cool down. These sessions would usually last between 15-30 minutes.

Steph's article made me think. I've spent many years exercising but not getting the results I had hoped for and now perhaps I had an idea why. Since I was in my twenties a number of people have told me that I don't need to diet but just exercise. This has never worked for me; although I did manage to keep my weight in check when I was running seriously I still never felt slim.

I put this down to the fact that these were men and that as men have I higher percentage of muscle that they were simply burning more fat during this exercise. This probably does have an impact however the most recent person to say it to me was a woman. One thing the majority of these people have in common (not counting the fitness fanatic I live with!) is that they were in the forces.

This is where Steph's article suddenly rang a bell. It occurred to me that during basic training the recruits probably do quite a lot of this kind of training as opposed to massive endurance runs.

Recently I've heard quite a lot about ex-army people doing circuit type training in parks etc. which a lot of people seem to be turning to as a change from the local gym. If the results are as good as those being talked about with HIIT then they've definitely "hit" on the right formula. (Excuse the pun.)

So this afternoon before school pick up time I ran up to the park and then did 10x20 second sprints followed by 40 second cool down periods. A quick cool down and I went over the road to collect my daughter. I hope nobody could smell me! I enjoyed the work out and will definitely include it in me regime.

Tuesday's food diary looks like this:

Breakfast: Yoghurt with banana and cherries (200kcals)
Lunch: Bagel with chicken (300kcals)
Dinner: Salad and chicken (400kcals)
Snacks: Salad with oil and vinegar dressing(100kcals)
Olives (50kcals)
Drinks: 4x Coffee (40kcals) 1litre water(ugg) and 1 glass red wine(85kcals)

Total= 1175kcals