HIIT Vs Cardio for quick fat burn

Lisa's right. To lose weight, managing the eating is the major factor for most of us, and fast weight loss is bad for health.

If you're appearance focused, fast weight loss can also cause hair loss a few weeks down the road, haggard look, poor skin tone, and more.

To burn the most calories in total, longer mild to moderate cardio is usually the best contributor.

Maximum intensity steady cardio burns the most calories per minute. Sounds good, right? Nah, keep reading.

HIIT, since it includes a mix of less intense work between stages of very intense work, burns fewer calories per minute across a whole session than maximum intensity steady cardio.

But if someone trying to maximize total exercise calorie burn, here's where the problem comes in: Maximum intensity literally can't be sustained very long by anyone for hardwired physiological reasons. It's self limiting in duration.

Because of some lower intensity intervals between the maximum intensity intervals, HIIT can be sustained somewhat longer than maximum intensity steady state . . . but still not super long. It's also physiologically self- limiting.

We can do low to moderately intense cardio for a much longer session time, and more often, because it's less self-limiting. It burns fewer calories per minute, sure . . . but there can be lots more minutes.

On top of that, high intensity steady state or HIIT have another physiological downside: They're disproportionately fatiguing.

That means we carry fatigue into the rest of our day. We drag though the day, subtly moving less, resting more, burning fewer calories doing daily life stuff than we would if well-rested and energetic.

Since the overwhelming majority of people burn more calories doing daily life stuff like job and home chores than we burn in intentional exercise, this is meaningful. The fatigue effectively wipes out a chunk of the exercise calories from high intensity work, including HIIT.

If the goal is maximizing total calorie burn, for most people the sweet spot will be low to moderate intensity steady state cardio, done for as long as possible and as frequently as possible without incurring endurance-related fatigue.

Make an exercise time budget, the amount of time you can spend on exercising to burn calories. Find the intensity you can do that whole time and feel energized, not fatigued, for the rest of the day. Pretty much guaranteed it'll be low to moderate intensity, unless your time budget is truly tiny, and you're already very fit.

You didn't mention EPOC, but if that's in your thought process, forget about it. It's a percent of calories burned in the exercise session. Twice as many EPOC calories from HIIT, percentage wise? Maybe, but meh. A bigger percent of a small number of calories (because of the short session) is a smaller EPOC calorie number than a small percent of a bigger number. Because exercise in general burns fewer calories than most people imagine, EPOC differences are pretty trivial in practice.

I'm not dissing intense cardio. I do some pretty intense cardio. But I do it for athletic performance reasons, not to maximize calorie burn. I don't do it in fatiguingly big chunks, or every session, because excess fatigue is counter productive for performance, too.

Here's a more radical thought: Exercise is for health, performance and FUN . . . not calorie burn. That's just my opinion, I admit, but I think that mindset is results in a happier, more balanced life than worshipping at the altar of the almighty calorie burn.

Also: If appearance is your motivation, spend part of your time budget lifting weights. That won't burn many calories, but for most people will do more for looking good than pure cardio. Stick with lower intensity cardio alongside, though, if weight loss is high importance. Lifting also causes fatigue, and it's total fatigue that matters.

TL;DR: Manage your eating to lose weight. Don't lose weight fast unless you want to sacrifice heath and appearance. Do low to moderate intensity FUN steady state cardio for your whole exercise time budget to eat a few more calories while losing at the same sensibly moderate rate.

Make a smart plan, and I wish you great results from pursuing it.