Monday and Tuesday: Easy runs with some hill sprints at the end
Wednesday: Fartlek training
Thursday: Day off
Friday: Five mile run
Saturday: Hill running
Sunday: If working towards a marathon, a long run
If you are thinking of a cut-to-the-chase version of this and plan to run intensely every day can we politely suggest you don’t? Kerr says the Fartlek intervals are hard and therefore twice a week is the recommended max.
It’s a view very much in line with Taren Gesell, who once shed over four stone in weight. He is an endurance sport coach and founder of the Mottiv training company based in the icy Canadian countryside outside Vancouver but wasn’t always the lean distance-hungry runner he is now and found it extraordinarily hard to achieve his weight loss goal.
“I went from 215 lbs (15 stone) and not being able to run to the end of the street to being a top one per cent triathlete,” says Gesell.
Short hard bursts burn more fat
“I had a really hard time losing weight sustainably. I tried bodybuilding-style workouts I tried various diets – I was able to get down to about 190lbs but it was a big struggle. The thing that finally got the weight loss to stick and get down to losing a total of 65 lbs (4.5 Stone) was a mixture of mainly low-intensity workouts and then once, or possibly twice, a week very high-intensity workouts.”
A study carried out in New South Wales found that a group of young men defined as carrying excess weight experienced ‘significant reductions in total, abdominal, trunk and visceral fat’ after 12 weeks of 20-minute, intense interval sessions three times a week.
There are a number of ways in which it does this, says Gesell echoing Josh Kerr, but it’s really hard on the body so that kind of training would wear you out and injure you if you attempted it every day.
“When you do most of your training at an easy pace you burn a lot of calories during those running efforts and they help you undertake the intense sessions much more safely. Your cardiovascular fitness and general foundation is able to withstand HIIT training more easily.”
Gesell tells us that intense exercise has been found to burn between five and 15 per cent additional calories after exercise has ended, but the overall effect remains a mystery with a whole range of reasons potentially in the mix, including changes in insulin sensitivity and adaptations in the muscle tissues themselves.
On pure calorie burn, he says, “you use more calories on a steady run but consistently in studies high intensity wins on fat burn.”
So, the final answer to the question of short runs vs long runs for fat disposal is short and fast every time – both experts agree. But you can’t really do it every time. At the risk of sounding like a politician in a marginal seat, there are strong arguments on both sides of the debate and the middle way is best.
First published on gq-magazine.co.uk
