Kai Fusser, M.S., has been Annika's personal trainer for over 7 years and now also directs the fitness program at the Annika Academy at Ginn Reunion Resort.

Are you still doing "CARDIO"?

Walk into any gym and the first thing you see is people straddling treadmills, ellipticals or bikes for 45 minutes and more trying to burn calories and improving their aerobic fitness.

This is not an easy task for me to explain in a short fitness tip why we should stay away from the typical low to moderate-intensity continuous training (“CARDIO”) and instead do sprint interval training (SIT, or burst training).
Slow cardio is very time intensive (the number one reason people skip their workouts), only works on your aerobic fitness (and that fairly inefficient), burns some calories during the activity but has no impact on your metabolism and stresses your joints due to repetitive impact (especially running),  increases inflammation and makes you slow (the golf swing is a fast activity !).

Now here is a solution for you, SIT training will only take about 4-8 minutes 3 days a week. It works your aerobic and anaerobic system at the same time and is very effective for fat loss, will raise your metabolism for several hours after, will build “fast muscles” and reduce impact on your joints and helps reduce inflammation. Sprint training can burn the same calories as slow cardio in 1/15th of the time ! Slow cardio produces a lot of stress hormones (cortisol) while sprint training stimulates growth hormone ( have you ever compared the physique of a sprinter to a marathon runner ? its your choice).

It is the intensity, not duration that effects the adaptation to exercise.

There are different ways to implement SIT training, it can be done on equipment like a treadmill (rather with steep incline then high speed), stationary bike, upper body ergo meter or a X-iser or it can be done with no equipment like sprinting (athletes only), running up a flight of stairs, up a hill or with full body calisthenics like a Turkish Getup.
I recommend to start of with 4 min workouts (add 2-3 min of warm up before) with a sprint to rest ratio of 1-3, say 10 sec sprint with 30 sec rest (slow pace). As you feel more comfortable you should work your way down to a ratio of 1-1 like 20 sec sprint with 20 sec rest. The maximum total time  you would want to do is 8 min. (more is not better in this case).
Please remember that the sprints should be “high intensity” which is of course relative to your fitness level (compare a fully trained athlete with a de-conditioned couch hugger).

In any case you will be surprised how fast your body will adapt to the new and positive exercise stress, your energy level will increase, performance will improve, you metabolism will pick up, you will safe time and wear on your joints  and most of all it can be fun !

Happy SIT-ing,

Kai

For research on this matter I recommend to read some publications by Mark J. Smith, Ph.D "http://www.x-iser.com" or the research done by Dr. Izumi Tabata