And this is a neat take on it:
Guerrilla Cardio: Your most powerful weapon for fighting fat.
Here’s the problem: You can
develop the best darn set of abs this
side of the big river; but if they’re all
covered up by fat, what’s to show off?
Nothing but a big fat belly, that’s what.
Here’s the solution: Wage war on that
ornery abdominal fat with Guerrilla
Cardio. It’ll “free” your dear abbies
from that prison cell of cellulite faster
than any other cardio program ever
developed.
“So just what is Guerrilla Cardio?”
you ask. Well, it’s an eight-week, mil-itant
aerobics alternative specifically
designed for folks short on time and
“fed up” with abdominal fat—or just
plain body fat in general. The premise
is simple: Rather than waste half your
day lazily plodding along in the so-called
“fat-burning zone” on the
Lifecycle or treadmill, hoping the fat
melts off before you die of boredom,
you radically pick up the pace and
alternate bouts of 20-second maxi-mum-
effort sprinting with 10-second
periods of rest. You do eight of these
gut-busting intervals. And all told,
excluding the warm-up and cool-down,
it’ll take you only four short
minutes a day, three days a week. Yep,
you read right … FOUR lousy minutes
a day, THREE days a week. That’s it!
“C’mon, four minutes!?” you say,
incredulous as Arnold Schwarzen-egger
watching an infomercial for the
Ab Slide. “Bull——!”
I know, I know … in an age when
we’re bombarded by suspect quick-fix
fat-loss strategies—if you can even
call things like thigh creams, “fat-blockers”
and prescription diet pills in
and of themselves “strategies” for los-ing
fat—what I’m proposing is indeed
enough to sound most people’s “BS”
alarm. I mean, four minutes of cardio
a day for ridding yourself of all your
superfluous flesh? It does have a ring
of those “hypish” infomercials for all
different kinds of ab-training devices—
you know, the ones that work so well
you only have to use them three min-utes
a day, and you’ll miraculously
develop rock-hard abs! Right.
The Guerrilla Cardio program, how-ever,
is different. It’s not a gimmick. It’s
not based on blind guesswork or
hype. It’s a real solution based on sci-entific
research as well as real-world
experience. In fact, according to
Japanese researchers, it may be one
of the best possible training plans ever
developed.
4,5
Here’s the deal …
Building a better fat-burning program
Recently, Dr. Izumi Tabata, Ph.D., and
colleagues from the National Institute
of Health & Nutrition in Tokyo, Japan,
set out in search of “the ideal” aerobics
training protocol—one that would most
efficiently increase fat burning and car-diovascular
fitness. Such a plan, the
researchers believed, should be:
High intensity. For years, we’ve
been told that low-effort aerobics is
the best method for burning fat. New
research tells another story. While
studies show high-intensity aerobics
may burn a little less fat than its low-intensity
counterpart during the time
actually spent exercising, the total
expenditure of calories (and fat!) is up
to 50 percent greater with intense car-dio.
3
You see, most of the fat you burn
with high-intensity cardio occurs after
exercising, not during the workout
itself. Research presented in the jour-nal
Medicine and Science in Sports
and Exercise shows that when you
work out using high-intensity inter-vals,
the total amount of calories your
body burns is elevated up to 142 per-
measure of aerobic fitness. As exercise
intensity increases beyond your VO2
peak, your body shifts to anaerobic
(without oxygen) energy production. In
the face of this oxygen debt, lactic acid
levels build up in tissues, making your
muscles feel sore. Your ability to con-tinue
exercising at this point is called
anaerobic capacity. Notice that athletes
in sports where a high level of both aer-obic
and anaerobic fitness are neces-sary
(wrestling, basketball, boxing,
speed skating, etc.) are some of the
leanest, most muscular individuals
around. Unfortunately, with most of the
cardio programs offered up today, it’s a
case of “either/or.” You either maxi-mally
stress your aerobic system (like
most slow-go cardio programs) or max-imally
stress your anaerobic system
(like most high-intensity cardio pro-grams
with long rest periods). So
clearly, a cardio program that maximally
improves both aerobic and anaerobic
capacity would be a godsend.
Brief. Too much aerobics burns
muscle! And muscle not only helps
you look leaner and stronger, it also
makes your body more metabolically
active. The ideal cardio program
would be just long enough to “spark”
your metabolism for that important
post-exercise fat “burn” but not so
long that it begins to eat away at your
hard-earned muscle!
In their search for the ideal cardio
program, the Japanese researchers
didn’t have to look far. Interestingly,
just up the road, their countrymen on
the National Speed Skating Team had
been practicing a form of cardio fitting
all of the above attributes for several
years.
2
And using it with astonishing
success, given their individual per-formances
at the most recent Winter
Olympics in Nagano, where Japanese
skaters won gold in the men’s 500
meters, bronze in the men’s 1,000
meters and bronze in the women’s 500
meters. More astonishing yet, per-haps,
might be these athletes’ builds—
cent more than low-effort aerobics
within the hour after your workout.
And it doesn’t stop there. Research
published in the journal Metabolism
shows this potent post-exercise
“burn” may persist for up to 48 hours
after exercising.
1
Fitness-promoting. The more fit you
become, the more likely you are to use
fat as fuel for any given activity. Peak fit-ness
is generally defined as having both
a high aerobic and anaerobic capacity.
Your maximum oxygen capacity, or VO2
peak, is generally considered the bestmuscular, powerful with hardly an
ounce of fat to show for … we’re talk-ing
body-fat percentages in the low- to
mid-single digits. Freaky lean, almost.
By now, you can probably guess
that this “secret” Japanese training
protocol is similar to the one I intro-duced
you to at the beginning of this
article—eight intervals of 20-second
maximum-effort sprinting intermixed
with 10-second periods of rest. That’s
right, four minutes total, excluding the
warm-up and cool-down. Intense …
fitness-promoting … short … and, as
you’ll come to discover, not so sweet.
Putting Guerrilla Cardio to the test
“… 8 very hard 20-second intervals
with 10-second rest periods may be
one of the best possible training pro-tocols.”
2
—Izumi Tabata, Ph.D., National
Institute of Health & Nutrition,
Tokyo, Japan
To test the effectiveness of this brief
but brutally intense regimen, Dr.
Tabata and colleagues pit it against a
moderate-intensity endurance pro-gram
commonly prescribed by advo-cates
of the so-called “fat-burning
zone.”
4
In the moderate-intensity group,
subjects riding exercise cycles were
asked to pedal at 70 percent of VO2
peak for an hour a day, five days a
week. VO2 peak and anaerobic capac-ity
were measured before and after
each training session for the duration
of the six-week study.
A second group also exercised five
days per week—only, these folks
weren’t afforded the luxury of pedal-ing
along at such a leisurely pace.
After a short warm-up, this group was
made to carry out eight sets of 20-
second maximum-intensity sprints on
an exercise cycle (170 percent of VO2
peak—were’ talkin’ intense, folks!)
