FOUR MINUTES a day to become trim!

DID you know you could get fitter by exercising for just three or four minutes a day? Furthermore, the miracle workout, known as HIT (high-intensity training) sheds fat twice as fast as an average gym session.

It improves your stamina and your strength, reduces the amount of sugar in your blood stream and releases fatty acids that can then be burned off by your muscles. In short, HIT burns fat fast and causes your body to continue burning fat for hours after you’ve worked out.

One form of HIT was developed in the Nineties by Dr Izumi Tabata, a former researcher at the National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Tokyo. His four- minute ‘ Tabata’ workout sounds easy: eight 20-second bursts of activity with a ten-second rest between each — less than four minutes of exercise in total.

It’s not. I tried a HIT workout, which involved four sets of squats, pressups, lunges and ‘the plank’ (placing your elbows and forearms on the floor, balancing on your toes and keeping the rest of your body off the ground) in quick succession.

The first 20-second set of fast squats was easy, but I was breathless when I reached the ten-second rest period. By the middle of the second set, I was finding it hard to maintain my pace; during the third bout my thighs were burning, my chest was pounding and sweat dripped from my brow. My legs began to tremble too.

Next came the press-ups. During the second set, my arms collapsed and I lay face-down on the mat panting for breath. Then it was on to the lunges, then four bursts of the plank position. Counting the rest periods, my first training session lasted almost eight minutes, and they were some of the longest of my life.

It was the hardest and most intense workout I’d ever done. I felt like I’d aged 40 years after the first session.

My next session, three days later, featured squats, dips and stomach crunches. My whole body resisted and every move hurt — but I was amazed to find I had improved upon my last session. I quickly started to notice the benefits: I slept better and felt more alert during the day, and because the routine was so short, I could easily fit it in.

At the end of two weeks, my arms were better defined, my chest looked and felt more taut, and my legs felt toned. Tabata is the hardest workout I’ve tried, but it was worth every excruciating second.