Weight loss
Weight loss
Weight loss
Stephen says: “The old ethos for people looking to ‘burn fat and get lean’ was to spend endless hours pedalling at a low intensity to develop your body’s ability to utilise fat as a fuel and save your glycogen stores. This is still a method to help you body adapt to becoming more efficient and lose weight but for those people who do not have endless hours to train midweek and at weekends, we need to find alternative methods and sessions to meet our requirements and weight loss goals.
“Your number one goal needs to be burn as many calories as possible in your time available, i.e one hour’s riding, and High Intensity (HI) training does that. HI training even in short bursts, efforts of one to three minutes, will dramatically increase your calorie cost and lead to a bigger overall expenditure along with the added benefit of increasing your speed and power.
“HI training maintains a higher metabolism for as long as ten hours post-training so you continue to get the benefits during the day and this all adds to the overall calorie expenditure.”
The training session – high-intensity calorie burner
Ten minutes warm-up (zone two)
2×7 minute tempo efforts (zone three) with five minutes steady riding (zone two) between each effort
Five minutes steady riding (zone two)
3×2 minute hard efforts (zone five) with three minutes recovery (zone one) between each effort
Five minutes recovery (zone one)
4×30 second maximum efforts (zone six) with one minute recovery (zone one) between each effort
Five minutes cool down (zone one)
NB* The key to any weight loss and efficiency is good day-to-day nutrition