Looking for a quick and effective exercise to burn your fats, lose some weight and tone your body?

My hubby and I found something you might be interested in.

It involves only 4 minutes of intense exertion, and you need only set aside 20 minutes of your time for the workout (excluding the warm-ups and cool-downs). And best of all, you can customize the intensity of the workout based on your fitness level. Sounds doable? Definitely worth giving a try!

This fat-burning, anti-aging and mood-lifting exercise that we have discovered is the “Peak 8” exercise recommended by Dr Mercola.

What your 4-min fat-burning exercise looks like

Here’s what you need to do to give “Peak 8” a try.

Decide on your preferred mode of physical activity. Yes, you can walk, run on a treadmill, run outdoors, or use a gym-bike. But wait, I have not gotten to the most crucial part of this fat-burning exercise yet. Read on.

Remember to warm up by doing some stretching exercises.

Then here goes. Exercise as hard and fast as you can for 30 seconds. In other words, walk or run or cycle as fast as you can, for just 30 seconds. I emphasize, “as fast as you can”, as if you were running for your life.

The aim is not to hit a particular pre-determined speed during the exercise. Rather, the aim is to raise your heart rate (by exercising as fast as you can) to what Dr Mercola knows as the “anaerobic threshold”. To achieve this threshold, some of us just need to walk very quickly, while others may need to break out into a mad-sprint before the threshold can be reached.

Only you would know if you have pushed yourself far enough, ie. if you have reached your threshold. At the end of the 30s, you should be gasping for breath and feel like you can’t possibly go on further. You will also experience a “burning” feeling in your leg muscles as lactic acid builds up in them.

After this first 30s of high-intensity exertion, allow your body to recover for 90s by walking, jogging or cycling slowly.

When this 90s is over, start the 30s of high-intensity exercise again.

The entire Peak 8 routine comprises 8 repetitions of 30s high-intensity exercise, interspersed by 90s of recovery time. So effectively, Peak 8 uses up only 20 minutes of your time each time.

Two important points to note.

If you haven’t been exercising before this, or are not in good physical health, you should probably work your way up to the 8 repetitions. For a start, you could do a Peak 2 or 3, then slowly increase the number of high-intensity repetitions to achieve Peak 8.

On the other hand, even if you are physically very fit, you should limit the number of times you carry out Peak 8 exercises to only 2 to 3 times a week. For otherwise, you could do yourself more harm than good.

To maximize your Peak 8 efforts…

To maximize your Peak 8 efforts (don’t let all the mad-sprints and panting go to a waste), you should try to do the following:

• have enough rest and sleep at night
• drink plenty of water
• consume lots of vegetables and high quality protein
• avoid high fat foods before the exercise, and sugar or fructose in the 2 hours immediately after your Peak 8 exercise
• get enough vitamin D (by going under the sun, it’s free!)

Give “Peak 8” a try, and let me know it turns out for you!

Reference
http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitness/archive/2010/12/24/a-fountain-of-youth-in-your-muscles.aspx

Cindy L. TJOL is trained in Psychology, Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine. She has several years of experience writing on natural health on the internet. Follow her on her blog and read her other articles at Insights On Health.com.