How Cardio Intervals Help to Effectively Reduce Belly Fat
Everyone should include exercise in their daily routine to reduce the risk of illness, enhance sleep, build stronger bones and muscles, enhance mental clarity, and elevate their mood. You’ll need to work out harder and pay attention to your nutrition if you want to lose weight around your stomach. For the most effective reduction of abdominal fat, cardio is king. You burn more fat throughout your aerobic activities if you burn more calories. Interval training is useful in this situation. An expert we talked with explains in detail how to utilize exercise intervals to burn belly fat.
What Are Cardio Intervals?
According to Michael Thorsten, a certified personal trainer and club leader at Life Time Beachwood, “Cardio intervals are a great tactic for burning belly fat because they allow you to be specific with your approach.” “Yes, all activity burns some fat, but you may burn a lot more if you perform a given exercise at a certain intensity. The secret to cardio intervals is that they enable you to deliberately target body fat.”
Cardio intervals that switch between low and moderate intensity will burn the most body and belly fat. This alternation of intensities also helps control cortisol and stress levels, which can be a major roadblock between you and losing belly fat.
What Form of Cardio Works Best in Interval Training for Belly Fat Loss?
“When picking the type of cardio you are doing, there is no activity or modality that is more effective than others,” Thorsten stresses. “The magic of intervals is all created by the change in your heart rate. We need to see your heart rate go up for some time and then see it come back down. This can be accomplished by running, biking, swimming, anything!”
Choose a cardio activity that doesn’t cause discomfort and the one you will most likely stick with.
How Long To Perform Cardio Intervals To See Results
When your goal is fat loss, every minute you work out counts. After all, the more you exercise, the greater the number of fat calories you’ll burn.
“You must monitor the stress being put on your body with this activity. More stress equals more cortisol, [which] equals less fat loss,” Thorsten tells us. “It is also important to consider that if we are focused on losing belly fat, we cannot just be doing these cardio intervals. We must leave some time throughout the week for strength training.”
For these reasons, Thorsten recommends performing two to three cardio interval sessions each week. Keep in mind that these workouts shouldn’t leave you feeling fatigued. Twenty to 30-minute workouts typically get the job done when completed at a low to moderate intensity.
“Combined with proper nutrition, one can expect to see meaningful results in as little as a month,” Thorsten explains. “That being said, any time we change up the activity regimen, I always ask clients to try to stick to a new habit for 12 weeks to measure its effectiveness.”