Kick Start your Metabolism with Interval Training

Have you ever worked out till your heart wanted to burst out of your chest? Or are you the sort that likes to cruise along, at just a steady pace?

Well, the part where your heart is about to burst out of your chest.. that they like to call, interval training.

Interval training is when you vary your speeds and intensity throughout a shorter run. So, you might jog for three minutes, and then push yourself hard for a minute, repeating this cycle for a certain amount of time (usually around 20 total minutes). This type of training not only burns fat it also builds up your oxygen capacity while exercising, and keeps your metabolism high for the rest of the day. It’s like a furnace that burns and burns and doesn’t want to be put out.

photo credit – fitnessrepublic.com

Which means, you can actually work for sorter spurts, without having to do cardio for hours on end.

So let’s talk about the heart.

Your heart is a muscle. If you keep it beating at a constant rate, never expanding it outside of its comfort zone, it will never grow. If you do 50 chin ups everyday and don’t feel it, your strength will never develop. Same thing with your heart – if there is no exertion then nothing will change. However, when you throw some intervals in there, your heart will have to work harder, pump more blood, and work harder to return to normal levels. This also helps with dealing with stress in day to day life. If your heart is trained to take bursts of blood pressure, you actually will have a better chance of coping with everyday life, and stress of work too.

And if you suffer from the dreaded muffin top, an interval workout is the ideal plan. Alternating between periods of pushing your body to the max with rest periods has been proven to help you lose belly fat. Interval training also revs up your metabolism! In a study from the journal Cell Metabolism, researchers found that periods of intense cardio can fire up certain genes that initiate the fat-burning process.

If you’re not sure where to start, try this:

35-minute interval running which is –

1 minute burst of speed,  then 1.5 minutes power walking.

Repeat till you’ve done 35 minutes. I guarantee your heart will be exploding in your chest and by the end of it, you would have taught that muscle to take burst of pressure and stress!