Heard about the current celebrity workout trend of exercising for only five minutes at a time?
Here’s how to make it work for you.
The theory goes that exercising for just five minutes is enough to kick-up your metabolic rate so you burn more calories for some time after the five-minute mini session.
By doing this every couple of hours you’ll be torching loads of extra cals through the day, leading to better fat loss results than if you did one long session.
Cool, right?
Could this be the long awaited magic bullet which enables us all to get super-lean fit bodies with virtually no investment of time and effort?
Short answer: No
Sorry about that.
First up, who, has a lifestyle where we can bang out a five minute fitness session every two hours?
Imagine how much hassle that would involve for most of us living in the real world!
Secondly, does anyone really think they can get a proper workout in five minutes?
It takes me longer than that to get into my kit sometimes!
(Call me cynical, but I can’t help wondering if these celebrity trainers are slightly exaggerating how short their clients’ sessions are.)
Without a warm-up it’s not a good idea to be going all-out to the limits of your fitness in five minutes. So how are you going to get fitter?
If you’re not pushing yourself, you won’t increase your metabolic rate very much. Also – and this is really bad news – you won’t be adding fat-burning, definition-sculpting muscle tissue to your body.
But there is some good news.
If you do at least five minutes of moving around every couple of hours as well as, your workout. That could really accelerate your progress.
Feel bad about taking time out of your busy job to do that? Don’t. You’ll almost certainly recoup the time by being more focused and efficient as a result of the chemical changes exercises stimulates in the brain.
You probably won’t want to get sweaty, but that’s OK, simply walking around dramatically increases your heart rate compared to sitting. Throw in some purposeful stair climbing and just four five-minute bursts of activity could torch up to 200 extra calories per day.
Plus you’ll probably find that you have more energy generally. When ‘proper workout’ time comes you’ll be more up for it on a mental level and perform better physically because you won’t be hitting it with a cold, sluggish system.
Use it like this and you too can boast that you have of those five-minute celebrity bodies! 😉