Interval training —have you heard of it? It’s a type of exercise that is becoming increasingly popular these days, and there are some very good reasons why. Let’s look at a few here, and some pointers on how to do it.

For a long, long time, most of us have believed that endurance-focused, aerobic exercise is the way to fight fat, and become lean. However, research is showing that this type of exercise, in fact, is not the way to lose fat and gain muscle. Why might this be?

Believe it or not, the reason is closely tied to hormones.

And before we go any farther with this discussion, I’d like you to envision a sprinter and a marathon runner.

Got it in your mind? Good. What do you see?

Is the sprinter full of compact, strong muscles that are full of tone? And is the marathon runner very thin, with slight musculature? Who looks healthier and more robust to you?

If you answered the sprinter, then interval training, also sometimes referred to as burst training, is a means to create such musculature and strength in your own body. Let’s see how.

When we do endurance training, two hormones that have a huge impact on anti-aging, human growth hormone (HGH) and testosterone, are pushed down for about 36 hours after we finish exercising. Additionally, long, low-intensity endurance training increases oxidative stress in the body—and oxidative stress ages us and makes us more susceptible to injury and illness.

That being said, while doing this type of exercise, you ARE burning fat—but for the next 36 hours you’re a carbohydrate-burner, consuming your muscle rather than fat.

So, would you rather burn fat for the period of time that you’re exercising, or would you rather burn it for a day to a day-and-a-half following exercise? And would you rather allocate an hour a day to exercise, or 12-15 minutes, every other day, to exercise?

If you choose the second options, then you should definitely consider interval training.

Interval training is a type of exercise that can be done by any person of any age, using many ways of bringing the heart rate up for a short period, then resting and allowing the heart rate to return to normal, then bringing it up again.

By doing 3-4 sets of 30-60 second bursts of activity, followed by a period of time that allows the heart rate to return to normal resting rate, a person can accomplish 24-36 hours of fat-burning—all for about 12-15 minutes of effort, every other day (and this period of rest really is important, as it allows the muscles to heal and recover.)

How can this be?

If you take all that happened in the endurance activities related to hormones and oxidative stress, and flip it, you’ll have your answer.

Interval training pushes the hormones for weight loss and anti-aging in the correct direction—HGH and testosterone are raised. And while only sugar is burned during this type of training, not fat, once the training is complete, fat is the medium of energy that is burned for the next 24-36 hours—while you’re working on the computer, sitting down to eat, even sleeping!

As you can see, interval training definitely is worth your consideration.

So, how do you do interval, burst training?

You could ride a stationery bike, work on an elliptical machine, sprint on a trail, run up stairs, jump around in your living room (kids love this technique, by the way!) —there are lots of ways to bring your heart rate up, and hold it there for 30-60 seconds. Then allow your breathing and heart rate to return to normal, then repeat the burst exercise. Do this 3-4 times, total, and you will have completed your exercise for the next 24-36 hours!

To further capitalize on this type of training, you might consider bringing in weight or resistance training, to further build muscle. As most of know, more muscle in the body leads to a higher resting metabolism than more fat in the body.

If you want to incorporate strength training, it might look like this:

If you work out on Monday, doing your 3-4 burst intervals, you would follow with 1 round of weight/resistance training, to the point of muscle exhaustion, in your large lower body muscles.

Then, on Wednesday, you would do your 3-4 burst intervals, followed by 1 round of weight/resistance training, to the point of muscle exhaustion, in your large upper body muscles.

Repeat the Monday workout on Friday, then repeat Wednesday’s workout on Sunday, so on and so forth.

I encourage you to give this a try—and please let me know any fun or creative ways you “burst”—as always, there is collective synergy in the wisdom we each have to share!

Exercise is one of those topics that I find I’m discussing regularly—with patients, my husband, a neighbor, my children, friends—it’s something that finds its way into at least one conversation daily, but usually more often than that.

And why might this be?

Well, I think the reasons are as many as the facets of what moving our bodies does for us.

In my health-care practice , I will suggest it as a means to help a patient relieve anxiety or depression, through the release of endorphins and the increase of oxygen to the brain and the body’s tissues. Or I might be helping someone with being overweight, or experiencing insulin resistance, and I find out they are stymied by not being able to lose weight. Or it could relate to over-training, leading to injury of a joint or muscle-group.

In my exchanges with friends and family, it might be an issue of being unable to gain weight, despite a healthy diet. Or it might be a nagging shoulder pain from working too many consecutive hours on the computer. Sometimes it is just a discussion of who is doing what type of exercise and how it is working.

And goodness knows, I’ve run the gamut of exercise in my own life—from self-avowed couch potato in my early teen years, to aerobics-fiend in my late teens and early ‘20’s, to avid walker/occasional jogger and mediocre yoga practitioner in my late ‘20’s and early ‘30’s, to today, where a daily walk outdoors, interval training stretching and strength-building exercises make up the bulk of my formal “exercise.”

And in this period of time, there are some things I’ve learned, the first of which is that what works for one person, will not always work for the next. I’m also a big believer in keeping things simple, that when all else fails, I am never let down by lacing up my tennis shoes and taking a walk. I also have a deep respect for good stretching, done safely and daily—keeping the muscles loose keeps them oxygenated and primed for their function of contraction (it’s hard to contract something that is already contracted!) Keeping muscles toned through strength-building is key, too—the adage “If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it” takes on heightened significance the older we get.

We have developed over the millennia in accordance with what is required of us, physically, for survival. As hunter-gatherers, we walked the land and had very physically-demanding short bursts of energy required as we chased down our prey and prepared it for consumption.

The next era in human development was agriculturally-centered, also a very physical way of life, as land was tilled, planted and harvested. We had homes and farms to keep, water to haul, animals to tend.

These ways were our ways until the Industrial Revolution of the last 200 or so years. This shift decreased our physical demands for survival to a degree as we became more reliant on the services provided by a societal network of different skill-sets, and less on a home unit that was productive of many of the family’s needs.

This change in physical output for survival continued as we transitioned into the Technological Age, moving us further from daily physical activity to repetitive, machine-centric efforts as a means of commerce and economic return.

And in today’s modern technological age, most of us are hard-pressed to find much that is truly physically-demanding in our survival needs. As with the human drive to consume simple carbohydrates—a quick-nutrition source that was in short supply in our ancestor’s day—our desire to do less physically is something we have to actively challenge.

Certainly, we can all read about the importance of exercise, but if we are not called to do it in order to survive, then our instinct is to rest, to conserve our energy. And just as with the preponderance of packaged, carbohydrate-rich foods that greet us as we enter the gas station, or line the shelves as we leave the grocery store, we have to fight our impulse to act on these modern-day low-hanging fruit.

We have to actively, mentally pursue the notion of moving our bodies and foregoing sugary, carbohydrate-rich foods. Thank goodness for a prefrontal cortex!

So, this will be a portal for greater discussion on all-things related to moving the body. From stretching, to exercise equipment, to research on the most beneficial types of exercise for strength-building to fat-burning—there are many ways to take care of ourselves, naturally, by doing the thing we are designed to do: Move!