I have been getting a lot of emails from women who are either doing more than an hour of exercise a day or want to and are asking me for guidance in coming up with an extended day training schedule.  The obvious premise all these women are operating under is that if a little exercise is good, then a lot of exercise is great.  But that’s wrong thinking for most women.

We may all know a woman who does a copious amount of exercising each day and looks stunning.  So on the surface, it seems like if it’s working for them, it should work for us too.  However, the truth is that it won’t work for most of us.  In fact, it works against us.  But before I get into how it works against us, I want you to think about the woman who succeeds with extreme training.  Is she…

1. A professional athelete?
2. A person who has been training for years? (This fits many distance runners and triatheletes)
3. Under the age of 35?

I’m guessing that for most of you, the person you know who is an extreme trainer meets one or more of the above criteria.

But once you get over 40, things change.  Ever wonder why professional athletes are young?   Even Gold medal winner Dara Torres, considered a very aged athlete in her early 40′s has totally changed the way she trains.  She now acknowledges what I, nearly a decade older than Dara knows, your body cannot be pushed a continuous hard and long mode the way it could when you were young.  In Dara’s own words:

… and, most important of all, I had to recognize the importance of recovery for my mind and body

Yes, Dara has it right.  Rest and recovery times need to expand as we age.  So even she, a professional athlete, needs to spend more time in recovery.  Dara trains in much shorter segments than her younger competitors.  While we can train our muscles at any age, we need to incorporate more time for recovery the older we get.  If we don’t we are not only more prone to injury, we can actually end up increasing our body’s production of cortisol such that our body shuts down our metabolism and starts to horde fat which it does around our abdomens.

Now here’s the secret you didn’t know.  Effective training for people over 40 (and what Dara herself does) is to reduce training time but increase the intensity of your training.  When you do this not only can you maintain what is referred to as ‘load’ but you actually can burn more fat than the same load at a more moderate training intensity.

While there are several studies confirming this, the one I like the best is one done by Georgia Southern University¹ because they used women exclusively in the study.  The group was divided into 2 groups and each group did 2 separate sessions of exercise in which one session the weight lifted was heavy and the other light  (half the intensity of the heavy session).  Now the load, the energy expended, was the same for both workouts.  By that I mean if the heavy session included a session of bicep curls using 20lbs for 8 reps, the light session used 10lb dumbbells and the woman did 16 reps.  In both cases the load (weight x reps) was 160lbs.

What researches confirmed was that for more than 2 hours after the high intesnity sessions, the women experienced a caloric burn rate that was more than 2x the caloric burn rate of the light session.

Using the same load but doing it in a shorter, more intense period caused more fat burning!

So short, very intense workouts keep us in a fat burning mode for longer and provides us more time to recover.  You get a lean figure and more time with which you can pursue other activities.

And that’s a good thing!

1/ Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2002 Apr; 34 (4): 715-22.