Sprint Away Fat

You know that diet and weight training are critical components as far as dropping bodyfat. But when it really comes down to melting off the fat, it's all about cardio. Ask any figure or fitness competitor out there and they'll all tell you that the closer they get to contest day, the more cardio they do--some spend up to two hours daily! But now new research from The University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario) suggests that you can drop your cardio down to minutes a day and still burn off fat. The Canadian researchers had male and female subjects follow a six-week cardio program. One group did typical slow-and-steady cardio for 30-60 minutes a day, three times per week. Another group also trained three times per week but they did 4-6 30-second sprints with four minutes of rest between sprints each day. The scientists reported in a 2011 edition of the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise that the subjects doing the sprints, which totaled only 2-3 minutes of total cardio per workout, lost more than twice as much bodyfat as the slow-and-steady cardio group doing 30-60 minutes of cardio per session.

TRY THIS: Instead of running on the treadmill forever, do just six 30-second sprints. Although the study used 4 minutes of rest between sprints, you can ramp up the intensity even more and further reduce the time you spend doing cardio by resting just 1-2 minutes.