Want guilt-free fizz and a mince pie? All it takes is 13 minutes
AFTER 12 minutes of lunges, press-ups and other nasties in the glorious drawing room of an upmarket gym, I want to keel over on one of its elegant sofas.
I’ve drastically underestimated how gruelling a 13-minute routine can be. Zana Morris, elite trainer and founder of The Clock gym in London, is coaching me through an express strength-training session.
Completed four times weekly, it will fine-tune my body into a more efficient fat-burning machine. Meaning, I won’t merely look better, I’ll be able to eat more too — and just in time for the Christmas party season!
This is because strength training builds and improves muscle tone. Muscle uses more energy than fat, so even when you’re lolling on the sofa watching a re-run of Love Actually, your metabolism ticks along at a faster rate than before.
If you gain a pound of muscle, you’ll burn 50-100 extra calories a day. But getting there requires many hours of sweating effort at the gym, surely?
Miraculously — no. A recent study found that significant increases in strength and endurance can be achieved with just three weekly 13-minute resistance training sessions over two months. The gains rivalled those achieved with a substantially longer workout.
One set of each exercise gets results, but you must exert yourself until your muscles feel like jelly. The technical term for this is — aptly — ‘working to failure’, where you keep going until you really can’t do any more. It might sound daunting, but it’s worth it.
Morris says: ‘If you exercise at a high intensity, the body does most of the work after the session in the recovery period. It has this massive disturbance on muscle fibres, and even when you stop, that keeps going.
With high intensity exercise, working up to 95 per cent capacity, your metabolism goes up from two to 48 hours after the session. That means you’re burning fat faster for up to two days after you’ve trained.
‘It also seems to have an impact on your growth hormone, a hormone that targets belly fat and helps build lean body mass. You build muscle much faster with high intensity exercise.’
MANY women fear bulking up, but, says Morris (whose clientele includes a clutch of Alisters, though she refuses to namedrop): ‘It doesn’t mean you’ll get bigger. Most people are looking for tone. Tone is muscle. It’s a tight, firm muscle. It burns calories. Which means if you’ve got muscle tone, you’re burning more calories even when asleep.’
We fit nine tough exercises into my 13 minutes. At the end of the session, I’m not breathless but there isn’t a squeak of energy left and my legs feel shaky. The next morning it hurts to laugh.
I leave 48 hours before my next session, which is in my sitting room. My first solo effort at the workout takes a while, as I’m still mastering the techniques, but within a week, I’ve trained myself and am bang on 13 minutes.
Morris, who is also a nutritionist, says that if you start doing this express workout now, four times a week at 85 per cent of your capacity, she estimates ‘you’ll lose 2-3lb of fat and gain 1-2lb of muscle. If you could combine it with a sensible low-carb higher protein eating plan, you’d probably shed 5-6lb of fat and gain up to 3lb of muscle by New Year’s Eve.’
That means you’d burn roughly 100200 more calories in a day, not including the 200 from the actual session or the post-training calorie burn, so, on workout days, I make that up to a whopping 400 calories, or two glasses of fizz (182 cals) and a mince pie (210).
Call it an early Christmas present.