I’m going to admit something that might shock you. I’ve been a professional fitness instructor for about ten years. During that time, I’ve studied quite a few different fitness programs. All of them required exercising for long periods of time. I was trained to think that I needed to keep my body going for 45-60 minutes to get a good work out… the kind that would burn off fat and increase both the strength of my heart and the capacity of my lungs.

Recently, I’ve learned from seeing all the research on this topic, that I had it all wrong. It turns out that I was busy getting my clients to exercise in a way that was contrary to their goals. The reality is that exercise programs using short bursts of intense physical activity are much more effective in increasing your body’s cardiovascular (heart) and pulmonary (lungs) capabilities.

Now, it is true that if you do long duration exercise that your body will develop the stamina for something like jogging five or ten miles — but it’s doing that at a cost.

I’ve actually seen studies that compared the results of men doing both short burst workouts and long duration exercise. In the study I read about, men who performed repeated short sessions of exercise reduced their heart disease risk by 50% more than those who performed long duration exercise. Let me explain why:

Your body has what’s known as reserve capacity. It’s your ability to respond effectively to sudden demands placed upon it. The problem with exercising for long periods of time is that it makes the heart, lungs, and muscles smaller so that they can go longer with less energy. This may sound like a good idea, but it’s not.

While your cardiovascular system may learn to handle a 30-, 45-, or 60-minute jog, it loses its ability to rapidly provide you with big bursts of energy for short periods. So instead of protecting your heart, you actually become more vulnerable to a heart attack! To further exacerbate the situation, your heart and lung capacity shrinks with age, so this exercise only accelerates these negative changes of aging.

In addition, when you do long duration exercise your body slows down its overall metabolism, and burns less fuel. This is the opposite of what you want when you’re trying to keep lean and fit.

When you do short burst intense exercise, your body creates an oxygen debt. In other words, when you start panting it’s because your body used up more energy than it had available and now it’s trying to pay back that oxygen debt. During this exercise process, your body creates lactic acid which must be cleansed, and this keeps it working even after you’ve stopped exercising.

Furthermore, you’re teaching your body that it needs to get bigger so it can cope with the demands of the intense short burst exercises. This causes your heart, lung and muscle capacity to increase. And finally, it’s much easier for most people to squeeze in a short intense workout rather than an hour-long workout just for cardio, so there’s a better chance that you’ll stick to your program.

I strongly recommend that you use short burst exercise for your cardiovascular workouts. You can create your own workout or use one developed by a fitness professional. I’ve recently created a program that I call “Cardio Combustion”. It uses only short burst exercise and has the added dimension of low intensity exercise during break time. When these two types of exercise are combined together, it really packs a wallop that will get you into amazing shape. If you want to learn more about my program, you can go to the link below.

[Ed. Note: Kimberly Jones has been a certified fitness trainer for ten years. For more information on her Cardio Combustion program, click here.]

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