High intensity interval training
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By Lee Sung-hun
Approximately 30 percent of the entire world population is overweight, ranging from mild to severe obesity, according to recent surveys. That is a staggering 2.1 billion people out of 7.2 billion.
In comparison to 840 million folks with malnutrition issues, it’s about 2.5 times as much. Some economists have gone as far to suggest that the economic loss due to reduced productivity and social expenses to solve issues caused by obesity, and the actual health care cost attributed to obesity is more than $2 trillion worldwide.
That is more than Korea’s annual GDP of $1.45 trillion, and matches the annual GDP of Italy and Russia.
Obesity has become an issue that the government needs to take action against because of its high socio-economic cost.
Losing weight and then keeping the ideal weight is generally a difficult process for most of us, but the essence is basically to reduce the input (consumed calories) and increase the output by burning calories with exercise.
Many experts agree that the importance of diet and exercise should be at about a 7:3 ratio, where your diet matters significantly more. As an example, drinking a cup of café latte ― an after-lunch favorite for many Koreans ― can gain so many calories that it requires more than 40 minutes of walking just to burn them off.
In other words, monitoring what you eat is more important than exercising.
This is why most weight-loss programs concentrate on controlling dietary intake while using exercise to gain the plus alpha effect. Another benefit for adding exercise to a weight-loss diet is that you maintain the muscle weight that would have been lost along with the burnt fat.
Exercise can allow you to not only maintain but actually gain more muscles to even increase your Basal metabolic rate. Recommended exercises for such cases are steady state exercises such as light jogging and walking, and you will need to do it for more than 30 minutes each day. The reason for the duration is because our body only starts to burn off the excess stored fat after about 30 minutes of exercising.
However, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has recently gained popularity as it is touted to cause weight-loss even with short bouts of exercise. HIIT can typically last anywhere between 4 and 30 minutes.
Its goal is to take on high intensity exercises that will require at least 80 percent of your physical capacity (typically measured as heart rate reserve) while repeating a minimum rest time to increase physical capacity and promote glucose metabolism and fat burning.
Most well-known example is the Tabata training program devised by Dr. Izumi Tabata in 1996 for the Japanese national speed skating team. One round consists of 20 seconds of training at maximum level and 10 seconds of rest, and eight rounds are performed in four minutes.
It has become popular as the four-minute program is claimed to produce the same results as one hour of exercise. The rest in between high intensity exercises can maximize the overall effect, and our body is made to believe that it is still exercising even after the training is done to promote more burning off of the calories. This effect can last up to 12 hours.
Tabata training can be adopted with any type of exercises, and it can be performed in a gym as well as any other places without special equipment. Examples include burpees (cycling through standing with feet apart, squatting down, extending the legs into push-up position, push-up and standing back up), jumping jacks (jumping with hands touching overhead), mountain climber (from the push-up positing, bending the knees in turns) and basic squats.
Other popular exercise programs such as CrossFit and Kettlebell exercises can also be called an HIIT. Debates are ongoing as to the optimum intensity, frequency and repetition for the body, but one thing certain is that they all require relatively short time to gain benefits. That’s good news for the busy modern day office workers.
You can always make a short time to perform effective exercises be it in your own house or even in the stairwell of your apartment building.