Is HIIT Good for Fat Loss?
HIIT Good for Fat Loss?
I was asked “is HIIT good for fat loss” by a friend the other day, so I thought I’d share my thoughts on it with you guys too.
The short answer is yes, HIIT is good for fat loss. Very good in fact.
Fat loss occurs when we we create a significant energy deficit. To that end, any kind of exercise would help us to lose fat. As with anything in life though, there good, better and best.
Good exercise would be walking. Better exercise for fat loss would be light weight training. Best exercise for fat loss would be HIIT, with a weights element to it.
HIIT being good for fat loss can largely be summed up in three points…
- It burns a lot of calories. This means a large energy deficit, which helps fat loss.
- It doesn’t take long, giving you longer to recover/prep healthy food.
- There’s massive variety, so you can avoid overtraining.
I’ll elaborate on each of these so you can understand how you can use HIIT for fat loss most effectively.
HIIT Burns a lot of calories.
Fat is stored energy. In order to lose fat, we have to feed ourselves fewer calories than our bodies require. Our body takes the extra calories it requires from our fat stores, therefore reducing them.
The longer this process goes on, the more fat we burn.
To burn fat quickly, we have to create a large energy deficit – burn a lot more calories than we replace. This is where the art and science of coaching comes in. Too little food and too much exercise will make the process stall quite quickly. Hormone production will be affected, energy will be affected and general wellbeing will be severely affected.
To lose fat effectively, we have to create a significant, but not enormous energy deficit.
Depending on a number of factors such as size, muscle mass, intensity, training history etc, a good 30 minute HIIT session will typically burn around 350 calories. This is my experience based on measuring the data in a university lab and with various calorie-estimating heart rate monitors.
If you were to do 4, good quality HIIT sessions per week, lets assume you’d safely burn up to 1400 calories. If you maintained a 500 calorie per day calorie deficit, you’d be in an average 700 (based on 4 x 350 calorie training sessions) calorie per day deficit, or 4900 calories per week.
Most experts agree that in order to lose 1lb of fat we require around 3500 calorie deficit, so by achieving a 4900 calorie deficit, we could expect to lose around 10lbs of fat every 7 weeks.
10lbs of fat is a lot. It’d be the equivalent of around 18lbs of scale weight, once you factor in water loss etc.
1400 calories burned in only 2 hours of exercise per week. Is HIIT good for fat loss? Yes.
HIIT Doesn’t Take Long
To busy people, the idea of sacrificing 5+ hours per week so exercise sounds difficult and unappealing. To some people, it’s pretty much impossible, even if they were willing.
That’s partly HIIT is so effective – it’s high intensity, so you work harder but for less time. More bang for your book, so to speak.
So lets take a real life example. In order to calculate calories burned, we can use the following formulas…
Men: Calories Burned = [(Age x 0.2017) — (Weight x 0.09036) + (Heart Rate x 0.6309) — 55.0969] x Time / 4.184.
Women: Calories Burned = [(Age x 0.074) — (Weight x 0.05741) + (Heart Rate x 0.4472) — 20.4022] x Time / 4.184.
I monitored my heart rate throughout this HIIT session…
At the send of the session, my average heart rate was 165bpm.
Using the formula above, here are my figures…
[6.6561 – 8.31312 + 104.0985 – 55.0969] = 47.3265 47.3265 x 30/4.184 = 339 calories burned in the session.
In 30 minutes, I’ve burned 339 calories, not including any afterburn thanks to EPOC.
In order to burn that many calories using other some other forms of exercise, you’d need to commit to significantly longer exercise times, which makes it harder to fit in to a busy schedule, therefore less likely you are going to do it.
Here’s a thing too. There are a lot of online calculators that grossly over-estimate calorie burn. They do this because they categorise activity into efforts such as ‘hard’ and ‘easy’. This self-reporting is notoriously inaccurate because people often assume/report they are working much harder than they really are. To get accurate data, use a heart rate monitor.
HIIT can be Varied
By it’s very nature, High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is a mixed modality form of exercise. The defining feature of HIIT is the mixture of high and low intensity exercise within the single set and session.
The constituent exercises of the HIIT workout are irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if your HIIT workout consists of kettlebell exercises, rowing machine work, running, cycling, barbell exercises, dumbbell exercises, skipping, tyre exercise etc or any combination of the above. As long as you are missing periods of high and low intensity exercise, you’re doing HIIT.
You can perform upper body HIIT sessions, lower body HIIT sessions or all-body HIIT sessions. You are limited only by the equipment you do or don’t have any your imagination.
This means HIIT is good for fat loss because you can ensure you train a lot of muscle. The more muscle you use, the higher your heart rate goes and ultimately the more calories you burn. The more calories you burn, the more fat you potentially lose.
Alongside the obvious variety benefits of HIIT workouts, you can also easily avoid the overuse injuries associated with other forms of training such as long distance running or cycling, where the movement is repetitive in nature and can lead to injuries if steps aren’t taken to stretch properly and perform corrective exercises.
By keeping your HIIT workouts varied by including a wide range of exercises, body parts, weights and rest periods you can make sure your HIIT is good for fat loss. In fact, with personal training clients who have fat loss as a primary goal, HIIT will make up a significant chunk of their training time with me.
I started this blog post by posing the question “is HIIT good for fat loss?” I think by considering these three reasons, we can conclude that HIIT is very good for fat loss!
For examples of HIIT workouts that would be particularly effective at helping you to lose weight and fat quickly, take a look at these…
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