High-intensity interval training, or HIIT, involves alternating short bursts of high-intensity exercise with slightly longer periods of low-intensity exercise. The goal is to spend 20 to 90 seconds working as hard as you can to increase your heart rate and then backing off a little to allow for a quick recovery before you rinse and repeat.
Research shows that HIIT can increase your metabolic rate and reduce both subcutaneous fat and belly fat better than other types of exercise, including moderate-intensity training and aerobic exercise [ 5 , 6 ]. For optimal fat burning, try to do some HIIT workouts a few times per week.
If you're new to the concept of HIIT, a personal trainer can show you the way. Along with high-intensity interval training, you'll also want to incorporate resistance training, aka strength training or weight training, regularly. Resistance training can help improve your body composition by helping you build muscle and lose fat at the same time.
In one study, a group of overweight women was instructed to start resistance training, with resistance bands, three times per week.
After a week period, the women lost a significant amount of overall body fat and belly fat without any muscle loss [ 7 ]. When compared to other types of exercise, resistance training also has a higher excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, or EPOC, for short.
This means that your metabolism may stay higher for longer after weightlifting, so you can burn more calories even after your workout is over [ 8 ]. When you gain muscle, it can increase your resting metabolic rate, or RMR, which means you burn more calories, even when you're not doing anything.
Macros are based on your caloric needs, so when you prioritize hitting them, you naturally stay on the right calorie diet for you. This will prevent you from taking in extra calories that can make it harder to burn fat. This will naturally lead you to choices like fruits, fiber-rich vegetables, lean proteins and slow-digesting carbs that keep you full and balance your blood sugar, while also helping to slim you down.
It's not all about dieting and exercise, though. Your body composition also has a lot to do with your mental health and the way you handle stress. When you're stressed out all the time, it increases the amount of cortisol in your blood. High cortisol levels can make you store more body fat, especially in the form of belly fat [ 14 ]. While it's impossible to get rid of stress completely, you can become more resilient to the effects of stress by regularly practicing things like yoga, meditation and deep breathing.
Learning how to say "no" and making sure you have a good work-life balance are also critical to healthy stress levels. Sleep plays an imperative role in weight maintenance.
There have been several studies linking getting less than seven hours of sleep per night with a higher body fat percentage [ 15 ]. This makes it much more tempting to skip your workout and your NEAT non-exercise activity thermogenesis naturally decreases as well. This decreases overall calorie burn throughout your day.
Lack of sleep also triggers a spike in your stress hormone, cortisol. This triggers your body to conserve energy aka, body fat. Your hunger and fullness hormones are also impacted. It too relies on a predictive algorithm that assumes your most likely fat mass for your age and gender ie.
Hi Alison, You'd be correct. The different methodologies can give massively disparate results. I've taught exercise physiologists and personal trainers all the different testing modalities and have had each student measure all their classmates and then I plotted them in a spreadsheet and graph to show how much of a difference there is between assessors.
It's huge. At least with DEXA, provided proper protocol is followed, we tend to see more intrasubject accuracy and reliability. But unfortunately you don't get many volunteers for that! Hi, in answer to Lisa; I'm 49 work a mad schedule in the corporate world of hours a day, need very little sleep but made a point a taking 3 hours a day for me.
I work out times a week mostly weight hate cardio although I would do a weekly spinning class and over the last year decided to reshape my body from OK to really good! I'm 1. On paper not bad in reality felt flabby and out of shape. I worked in 2 things diet and training. I started with dietician to make sure I would not do anything crazy and get in the right path and then made it fit for me. I increased the amount of lean protein egg white omelette, fish, little meat, low fat protein-whey impact isolate unflavoured , kept loads of green veg, added fat to my diet avocado, nuts , always been super low carbs, few berries and chocolate every day can't live both out my super dark few squares , virtually no alcohol champagne on Friday!
Skinny cappuccino and tea are on every day! I changed my training to heavier weights with less reps don't want bulk and working out with an ex body builder who controls my posture and counts the rep he does not take no or I can't as an answer.
In short after one year I have not lost weight, I'm now 57kg but my body fat has dropped to 7. I still need to do more work out to tighten my core further but the transformation is amazing no flab in sight and the bad circulation with swollen ankles has almost disappeared.
It's a lot of discipline but so worth it; I did not aim at a such a low body fat it just happened and thank god I'm not looking skinny probably c'ause I did not lose weight and I'm passionate about food and cooking which is the core of a healthy diet. Hiii Bill However, a small percentage of men in the U. With fit guys, this is typically in the easy-to-excuse, good-for-you-foods: peanut butter, avocados, hummus. White recommends shooting for four to six ounces of protein at every meal and around half to one cup of starch, and a couple cups of vegetables.
Have three main meals like this, and at least two smaller protein-heavy snacks in between. But it matters where those extra calories are coming from. In terms of reliability, the greatest inaccuracies are typically found in home measuring methods. For example, Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis is pretty spot-on when it uses widely-published maths formulas, a study published in BMJ Open found — but the machine-generated calculations found in home body fat scales vastly under- or over-estimate a person's data.
If you've got a set at home, try not to get strung up on the baseline digits — instead, focus on whether they rise or fall over time. Lowering your body fat percentage requires tactical management of both your diet and your exercise regime. However, in a nutshell, if you're in a calorie deficit — burning more calories than you consume — your body fat percentage will fall.
Start by using an online TDEE calculator to work out your daily calorie expenditure and reduce that by around kcals to begin crafting losses. To crank things up a notch, try adding some high intensity sessions into your routine.
Give the following workouts a crack and your six-pack should be on show in no time:. You might be wondering how BMI fits into the picture. A BMI calculator pits your weight against your height to ascertain whether you're a "healthy" weight, though some online calculators factor in additional information such as age, gender and activity level.
At its simplest, though, the formula divides your weight in kilograms by your height in metres , and the results are categorised as follows:.
There are some serious limitations in attempting to quantify your gym progress with a BMI calculator. This one-size-fits-all approach fails to take into account some pretty crucial data about your body composition — your ratio of muscle and fat, particularly visceral fat the dangerous kind that wraps around your organs , as well as your lifestyle.
By BMI's calculations, the strongest, fittest bloke on the rugby pitch could be overweight. A professional bodybuilder? Similarly, someone with a lower weight and high proportion of fat to muscle think: dad-bod could be considered "healthy", even if they rarely exercise and smoke a packet of cigarettes a day. As body composition metrics go, tracking your body fat percentage can certainly be useful for honing a washboard stomach, but it doesn't provide a reliable snapshot of your wellbeing.
Much like the BMI calculation, your body fat percentage doesn't reflect how well you sleep, how stressed you are, or how nourishing your diet is — all crucial factors that contribute towards your progress in the gym, and your general physical and mental health outside of it. Think about it this way: it's no use carving out a six-pack if you're too burned out to maintain it.
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