DIVIDE AND CONQUER
Admit you don’t have time to sweat it out for an hour – and hack your way to all-day fat loss
Rushed lunch-hour sessions are cooling your progress. Split yours to double your winnings
In today’s always-on culture of endless emails, board meetings and school runs, the 60-minute workout has become a myth. Let’s face it: despite the lies we tell ourselves, every well-intentioned lunch-hour session is worn away by warm-ups and showers. Honesty, however, is the best policy. A study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that admitting defeat to your schedule can pave the way to superior weight loss.
The research states that by splitting your 60-minute workout in two, you can burn double the calories while fitting the bite-size half-hour sessions more easily into your day. In other words, a morning 5K and a hill-sprint finisher followed by lunchtime deadlifts will target your paunch more effectively than slogging for a straight hour – or, rather, 40 minutes. This is down to an increasingly well-known process called excess post
exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC), sometimes referred to as “afterburn”. Your body continues to use oxygen after your workout to help you recover. This requires energy, so you keep burning up to 15% extra calories long after you leave the changing room.
The calorie burn that you get from EPOC after a single session is finite, however. The scientific advice to split your session in two not only offers you a smart way to circumnavigate your schedule, but will also speed your weightloss progress by doubling the amount of time you spend with the afterburners engaged. So, give yourself a break. When it comes to shedding belly fat, it’s better to do things by halves.