You want to lose fat fast.
So what do you do?
Find a hill and run up it. Today. Seriously. Do it.
You don’t have to go balls out like you’re trying to beat Usain Bolt in a race, just run fairly hard. About 75% of your top speed would be a good start.
Walk back down, catch your breath and do it again.
Then go home. That’s it for Day 1. No need to kill yourself or get injured. Only clowns train themselves into the ground like that. Smart people take the time necessary to prepare and adapt.
Two or three days later run up the hill again. This time try to less rest between sets or add another run.
Eventually, over the next month or so, work your way up to running up the hill about 6-10 times (depending on the length and angle of your hill) two or three days per week. The total time of the workout, not including warm up, shouldn’t exceed 15-20 minutes. But it will help you shred fat like nothing else.
As far as intensity goes there’s a very simple rule to remember. If you run up the hill on days you lift weights you can go hard.
Hard means somewhere between 90 and 95 percent of your top speed (use your judgment). Ideally the two workouts would be separated by 4-6 hours. If your set up is so that your hill is right next to your gym and you finish training and run up the hill immediately after, that’s completely fine too.
If you run up the hill on a day you don’t lift weights you should run at a lower intensity, in the range of about 75%. This recommendation is based off the work of the late, great sprint coach, Charlie Francis.
If you do something hard and intense, like lift heavy weights or sprint at 90-95% of your max speed/effort you need 48 hours to recover. That doesn’t mean you can’t do anything the next day. You certainly can, but ideally it would be of a lower intensity.
For sprinting this means that anything above 75% would be a bit too much, but anything at 75% or under is completely fine, and might even help aid in recovery from your more intense workouts.
So if you run hills and lift on the same day, go balls out.
If you lift today then run the hill tomorrow, cut the intensity down to 75% of your best effort.
Two sessions of 15-20 minutes per week seems to be about right for most people trying to lose fat. You can eventually work your way up to a third session if fat loss is your primary goal, but be warned that your strength in the gym may suffer, especially on things like squats and deadlifts. The older you are the more this will happen.
Running the hill will take care of the majority of your conditioning and fat loss but for some icing on the cake you could add a 5-10 minute finisher to 1-3 workouts per week.
I have a collection of 52 of them in Renegade Cardio that will get the heart pumping and the fat melting.
Train like a man possessed…
