Health Beauty & FitnessHealth, Beauty, Fitness Tips

If you’re looking to carve out a powerful and fit body for 2011 and burn fat fast you need to train harder not longer. The secret to cranking up your metabolism and melting fat away fast is high intensity training. Forget those long boring runs on the treadmill or tedious slow weight lifting repetitions, if you want to completely transform your body this year you need to crank up your heart rate and have some fun. There are lots of ways to do high intensity training for fat loss but today I want to give you a workout routine that is proven to melt fast in only 4 minutes of work. It’s something called the Tabata training protocol. This is a training regiment developed in Japan by Izumi Tabata and it’s all about doing more work in less time and giving you amazing results.

A word of warning before I go over the workout, this is not meant to be easy, this workout will kick your butt and challenge you like nothing you may have tried before to burn fat, it takes serious mental and physical toughness. OK if you’re still with me let’s start melting that fat away. The tabata protocol works with almost any exercise you can think of but all you need is your body and a stopwatch. You will be doing 20 seconds of work followed by 10 seconds of rest repeated 8 times which adds up to a 4 minute workout. Now before you embark on your training I highly recommend some sort of light warm up to get the blood flowing, a tabata workout is not something you want to go into cold. The best exercise for tabata newbies is the air squat, it’s simple, requires no equipment, and anyone regardless of fitness level can do it.

To perform an air squat stand with your feet shoulder width apart, bend at the hips kicking you butt back and squat down until your thighs are parallel to the floor and then push back up through your heals to the standing position. Now that we know what the protocol is and the exercise we will be doing let’s move on to this great fast fat building workout. Set up your stop watch on the floor in front of you so it is easy to see or, if you have a standard wall clock nearby you can use that as well. Also make sure to have a notepad and writing utensil available as well, we’re going to keep score here. Start your stop watch or start your workout at the ‘top of the minute’ begin your air squats moving as fast as possible while keeping good form, the key here is to work as hard as possible.

After 20 seconds stop and record how many air squats you completed. Rest for just 10 seconds and then start your next set of air squats. You’ll repeat this 8 times total trying to maintain your pace on every round. If you’re pushing yourself as hard as you can your reps should decrease significantly on each sequential set, this is why we mark down the rep count after each set. Once you’ve finished the intense 4 minute workout you should be absolutely gassed!! If you’re not you didn’t push hard enough and you’ll just need to work harder on the next one.

Now what you’ve done by pushing you’re body this hard with minimal rest is rev up your body’s metabolism which is igniting a fast fat building furnace. The tabata protocol when performed at maximum effort is proven to keep your bodies fat burning metabolism raised for up to 48 hours, which makes this a perfect workout to perform 3 days a week. The Tabata protocol is a quick workout regimen you can practice anywhere with no equipment and can be done in as little as 4 minutes. These workouts challenge your mind and body as a whole it takes a lot of grit to push yourself for those 4 minutes and finish strong. It’s not enough to just train your muscles you need to harden your mind in order to achieve your fat loss results in 2011.

The tabata protocol alone is a great way to challenge and fortify your mind and body and when combined with clean eating habits can transform your body faster than anything you have tried before.