When I started my journey to a healthier me I can honestly say I never worked out. With that in mind my diet was also terrible. After fixing my diet I began to notice my healthy lifestyle results. But it felt like I was getting there at a snail’s pace. Knowing that exercise was another cornerstone to a healthy life I decided to start exercising daily.

I don’t know about you, but for me exercise is that chore that I never want to do and I tend to procrastinate as long as possible. I decided to slowly work it into my new lifestyle with something I do everyday, walking.

In the beginning I wasn’t walking very far or long. But like most things in my journey I worked my way up to six miles a day minimum. Not to mention I started using sweatcoin and was now being paid to work out. If you haven’t heard of this app it’s free and you can earn about $5 a day in sweatcoin. Fair warning anything super cool costs thousands of coins. But it totally helps to keep you motivated.

Even with the little exercise I had added I could see the difference in how I looked and felt. The problem was it still felt like I wasn’t getting enough bang for my buck. I knew it was time to up the ante. I started doing a bunch of different workouts. If you ever want a reminder of how out of shape you are do a high intensity workout. Unfortunately, after doing the workouts I would get bored or burnt out on them really quick. I needed something that was fun, felt easy, worked different parts of my body, and would give me great results.

I know what you’re thinking I want that workout routine too. What I ended up doing was taking a calendar and writing out the parts of my body I wanted to work on each day. Then I would pick different workouts (normally those 30 day challenge ones) and pencil those in for my weekly schedule. I figured if after a month, if I couldn’t feel or see the difference I would swap out the workout with my next guinea pig.

Everything seemed to be going fine but I wanted great. I was reading through some articles by one of my favorite doctors, Dr. Josh Axe, and he was talking about burst training. Light bulb! This was what I had been missing. Burst or HIIT is when you speed up the pace of the workout for short intervals randomly throughout the exercise routine. For example, if you were doing jogging for 30 minutes you would jog 5 minutes, run 30 seconds, jog 5 minutes, and run again repeating the cycle until the 30 minutes ended. Wait now I have to work out even harder? Nope. Now we are working smarter.

Instead of doing the entire workout routine at the same pace you are forcing your muscles to keep guessing as to fast or slow. In the end you burn almost double the calories during the workout. But as an added bonus even after you are finished with your workout you are still burning calories long after you have stopped! Game changer. This is largely due to your body trying to anticipate the coming speed change keeping your muscles in a constant state of alert. With burst training you can even workout for shorter periods of time and get better results then you would doing the same workout at a constant pace. If you would like to know more about burst/HIIT training be sure to check out the information under the exercise link.