WORDS: LOUEE DESSENT-JACKSON; PHOTOGRAPHY: ARTWORK: PETER CROWTHER34 menshealth.com.au
A
WEIGHTLOSSSplit Your Workouts
To Double The Burn
Admit you don’t have time to sweat it out for
an hour – and hack your way to all-day fat loss
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 kilojoules 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). Your body continues to
use oxygen after your workout to
help you recover. This requires
energy, so you keep burning up
to 15 per cent extra kJs long after
you leave the changing room.
The kilojoule 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 weight-
loss 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.DIVIDE YOUR
SESSIONS IN TWO TO
INCINERATE TWICE
THE KILOJOULES.No Half Measures
Mix up your morning cardio to find
more interesting ways than running
to burn kilojoules in 30 minutesBOULDERING 1561
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2339ROWING
JIU JITSU
CYCLING
SKIPPING
KJS