If one of your fitness goals is to burn fat you’re probably thinking you’ll need to put in lots of time doing long, slow cardio workouts. How tedious and time consuming. Fortunately, there’s a better way. It’s called HIIT (or H.I.I.T.) and it should be a key part of your fat loss plans.

So what is HIIT? HIIT is an acronym for High-Intensity Interval Training. HIIT isn’t another one of those long slow cardio programs. Instead, a HIIT workout involves several cycles of short, hard exercise, followed by short less intense recovery periods. Done right, HIIT workouts are killers, but they don’t take a long time and they’re highly effective at burning fat and building muscle.

HIIT-ing yourself like this causes your heart rate to continually vary, going back and forth from a low level to near your maximum rate. HIIT workouts are short, but intense. A basic HIIT workout consists of a warm-up period, followed by several cycles of varying-intensity exercise, ending with a cool down period. But fortunately, HIIT workouts can be short.

Research shows that a HIIT cardio program can burn up to 9 times the calories as an old-fashioned cardio workout. Shorter, more intense workouts that give far better results than longer, more boring ones.

Why does HIIT burn fat & build muscle better than regular cardio? The spikes in heart rate and energy consumption involved in HIIT cause your body to release massive amounts of growth hormone and other chemicals that trigger fat burning and muscle growth. The intense work you do during the session causes your metabolism to run at a higher rate for many hours after your workout. During this time, your body is rebuilding the tissues stressed by your workout, making them a little stronger and better able to handle the workload you are subjecting them to.

High-Intensity Interval Training not only works better, it fits better into a busy lifestyle. If you’re determined to build a great body, you’re going to have to dedicate a lot of time to strength training. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the time to run long distances every day on top of strength training. HIIT is a solution to this problem.

HIIT can really make a difference in your fat loss results. But as with other aspects of your effort to burn fat & get fit, starting slowly is the best way to proceed. HIIT workouts are a particularly strong example of this general rule. I know from bitter experience that pushing HIIT too fast can leave you a quivering heap on the ground. Going too hard too fast is also a great way to lose your lunch.

HIIT is truly a more effective way to build muscle and burn fat on your way to awesome personal fitness. If you have any doubts, compare the physique of the typical marathon runner (long, slow distance) to the typical sprinter (short bursts of high-intensity effort). Which one has the kind of body you would want?

In order to get a lean and toned looking body you need to do two things – build muscle and burn fat.

The two aspects go hand and hand so they are important to understand. As your body burns the calories you consume you have energy.

When you consume more calories than you consume your body stores them as fat. When you burn more calories than you consume that fat will go away.

By engaging in various types of exercises you will burn those calories you take in and more.

Muscle is heavier than fat so you will burn more calories when you work out and when you rest as your muscle mass increases.

This means it will become easier for you as you gain muscle to be able to keep your body healthy and looking great.

There are a variety of exercises you need to take part in so you can build muscle. Resistance training is very important to this goal.

It won’t matter as much how much weight you are working with.

Too many people focus on that aspect but as long as you are pushing to do as many reps as you can you will make progress.

Your workout plan should incorporate a variety of exercises designed to help you build muscle.

What you want to accomplish and how you want to sculpt your body need to be taken into consideration as you devise your course of action.

You want your workout to be intense too so you can burn fat and build muscle in less time.

Rest is very important when it comes to the concept of being able to build muscle and to burn fat.

You only want to work your muscle groups every other day.

Make sure you engage in other forms of exercise on those off times. You want to have some cardio exercises to keep your heart healthy.

Getting enough sleep is also very important when it comes to being able to build muscle.

In most instances you will find you sleep better when you are working out and eating well.

What you eat is very important when you want to build muscle and to burn fat. If you give your body the proper fuel then it can work well for you.

When you consume foods full of bad carbs and bad fats though you will slow down your results.

Work hard to eat what is going to allow you to build muscle. You will be surprised at how important this is to helping you successfully burn fat.

It isn’t always easy to be able to build muscle and burn fat but you can do it.

Set goals for yourself and a realistic plan to achieve it. Make sure you have the right information about what you need to do to accomplish your goals.

Engage in a variety of exercises that are known to help with the process of being able to build muscle.

Eat right and get enough rest and you will be ready to tackle even your toughest workouts.

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.

On the other hand, if we trained like sprinters, with short explosive bursts our body will actually want to keep muscle and burn fat. This is because we need our muscles to better perform the workouts we are subjecting the body to. Also, the body, when exposed to this type of training actually wants to rid the body of its excess fat. This is because the fat on the body is simply hindering its performance. Hence, this is why short, explosive training stimulates hormones like growth hormone which help us build muscle and burn fat.

Well then how should you train? It depends on your goals. Do you want to look like a marathon runner or a sprinter?

If you want to be as thin as a rake, go running for hours on end.

However, if you want that lean, muscular physique much like a sprinters, here are a few suggestions:

30-100m sprints: Set out a distance and sprint all out for the set distance. For recovery, walk back to the starting line. As soon as you get back, sprint again. I wouldn’t do more than 8 total sprints in a workout. For example you could do 6 x 60m sprints.

Intervals: Pick an exercise you like, (running, swimming, cycling, boxing, skipping etc.) and give a near maximum effort (80-100% Max) for 20 seconds, followed by 40 seconds of rest or light exercise (40-60% of max). Repeat 5-6 times. No more than 10 reps is necessary. If you can do 10, focus on going more intense in each interval. I personally like doing these with shuttle runs over a distance of 10-20m.

10 minutes constant max effort: Pick an exercise (running, swimming, cycling) and go as hard as you can for approximately 10 minutes. Try to outdo yourself. You could do 10 minutes every time and try to beat the distance every time you do it OR you could have a set distance and try to beat the time every workout. I personally go down to the oval and time myself over 8 laps of the track.

In finishing, for maximum fat loss, I would recommend doing no more than 4-5 sessions a week. That equals, at most to 60-70 minutes of training time a week. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but if you spend every single one of those minutes going as hard as possible, your metabolism as well as those hormones will melt the fat off your body in no time.