Hello Health Champions. let's talk about 10 HIIT exercises to help you burn belly fat.
Number one is slam ball and HIIT stands for high intensity interval training
that means you do something very intensely for a short period of time and slam ball is
a good example you use a heavy ball 15, 20 30 pounds and you don't want it to bounce
a whole lot it's more just like a sandbag you slam it down and you got to pick it back up and what
you want to think about though is to go as much as possible in a straight line straight up and pull
straight down in this video you see a guy doing it on the beach i think he has a rock or something
and his form is not fantastic he's going a little bit too much forward to backwards and
he's not really good at protecting his back so make sure you go straight up straight down and
protect your back interestingly the vast majority of exercises to burn belly fat involves crunches
but the problem is it doesn't work you cannot choose a specific spot to burn
fat it doesn't do that so what happens is your muscle burns if you focus on crunches then you
work out one muscle a whole lot and it burns but there is no physiological relationship there is no
breaking down of the fat on top of the muscle if some exercise manages to break down fat which all
of it does to some degree but you're not breaking it down from the specific area you're working out
when you break down fat it's called lipolysis and it is systemic it happens equally all around
the body so focal training doesn't work for burning fat crunches can still be a good thing
if they're performed correctly because you build a strong core and that's a good thing
number two is medicine ball and just like the slam ball you could probably use the same ball
it is heavy and what you want to do in this example is you squat down and throw it up this guy
is showing excellent form he's protecting his back he's got his weight on his heel he goes deep and
he pushes up as hard as he can uses his whole body uses large muscles with high intensity excellent
exercise number three is sledgehammer so if you have a tractor tire and a big sledge hammer then
you want to use a tall posture go as high as you can pull that sledge down on the tire and slam
it down and this guy's showing excellent form he is not pausing at all he's just going from
one to the next which means very high intensity now what i have found personally is that a pick
ax works equally well in my backyard if you go with a pickaxe and you go really hard at it that
heart rate can really come up and i like to use my energy for something productive another popular
one is number four battle ropes and here you can do it different ways you can use your arms and go
alternating one at a time or you can pull the arms together up and down and when you do that
you want to go as tall as possible and then slam it down and use as much of your body as possible
now if you do it together to me that makes it a little bit higher intensity because you can
incorporate more of your body at one time if you look at this guy he certainly getting a strenuous
exercise but his legs aren't moving his glutes are not working it's static whereas this lady see how
her whole body is going up and down she's using her hips her legs and i think she could get even
higher to get a little bit more intensity out of it so i said that crunches are not really a great
idea to burn belly fat but why then would high intensity interval training work is it because
we're burning more calories per minute well yes we are burning more calories but the whole point
of high intensity is that we keep it so short that we're only really working at that high level
for a few minutes so for such a short time you're not really going to burn any more calories
however it is what happens afterwards because you release hormones you stress your body so that you
increase your metabolism for several hours after the workout and what happens when you go all out
when it's truly maximum high intensity you're increasing your production of growth hormone
dramatically and here's what growth hormone does it promotes muscle building and it promotes fat
burning so when you break down fat you're making energy but it's not at the expense of muscle that
is exactly what you want that allows you to build muscle over time and now when you have more muscle
what happens is muscle is more metabolically active you have replaced fat tissue which is
very low metabolism at rest with something that has higher vascularity and burns more energy than
fat even at rest and then there's the thing about body wisdom now this is my own personal opinion
i've never seen anything published on this but i believe this is one aspect of how it works as well
that if you weigh 400 pounds and you're sitting on your sofa watching a movie and the only strain you
put on your body is to click that remote control then your body has no reason to change anything
that body works perfectly fine to sit on the sofa and eat pizza and drink beer and click that remote
however if you're being chased by a wild animal if you have to fight for your survival if you have to
exert maximum force to get away from something then your body senses that that extra
hundred pounds is quite hindering it's not going to improve your survival so if you
put your body through that on a regular basis your body says you know if this keeps happening
i'm probably not going to survive with this extra weight so the body wisdom in my opinion is going
to work it's going to increase the metabolism somewhat to burn off that fat so you can have a
body that fits your lifestyle and your environment again it's not the biggest component necessarily
but i do think that's part of it number five is using a bike you could use a stationary bike you
could use a road bike and the great thing here is that it's relatively safe on the road maybe
you'll hit some speeds but on a stationary bike you're going to stay in one place and you don't
have to be extremely athletic you don't have to have this enormous fitness or body control
and if you have some knee issues you're not going to put a lot of weight on them and the key here
is to do it in bursts you can do 15 seconds 30 seconds one minute but it has to be all out if you
can do it for 30 minutes it's not the type of high intensity that we're talking about number six is
box jumps and this can be extremely effective the trick is that you have to be pretty fit and have
pretty good body control to do it safely if you're very fit you can do a continuous up and down and
if you're not quite as fit you want to make sure that you do it a little bit slower and you pause
between the jumps so you don't risk anything and here's an example of some very fit people that
just go back and forth back and forth there's no pause on the floor they just go right back to it
which would give you the highest intensity but again make sure that you do it safely and that
you're fit enough for what you're trying to do now let's try to understand this type of exercise
a little bit we said that if you do it for 30 minutes it's not really hit so the key is to
do very very short intense bursts but it doesn't mean that there's just one way to do it it means
that you can do different things depending on the intensity depending on your fitness depending on
the situation it could be 10 seconds it could be up to maybe two minutes and then you can repeat
or you can just do one of them but here's what you're trying to look for
you're trying to do something with high speed high intensity you're trying to get your heart rate
way way up and the key here if you're working on heart rate primarily is to get it close to or all
the way up to your maximum heart rate which is roughly 220 minus your age so again that's not
an absolute number mine for example will still get a good bit higher than that it helps you get
to your maximum heart rate if you can use your largest muscles or ideally all the muscles in
your body at the same time but if you're doing something like weight lifting or you're doing
squats or you're doing a leg press machine you can still do high intensity just because you're
using the largest muscles in your body if you do it heavy enough the other key is to do it dynamic
you want to use large movements so depending on the weight you want to do it at the highest speed
and the highest dynamic range that you can handle at that weight for that exercise and another key
is to do it basically until you fail and why is that because you're sending a message to your body
you're telling your body that i'm going to keep doing this we had a situation today where
this body just wasn't quite good enough and that gives the body the message it has to change
something and the way it changes is to produce more growth hormone so you can build more muscle
and burn off some fat and get better because you're planning to do it again
very soon the other thing to understand is because you're doing it so intensely you're also stressing
your body so i would suggest that you don't want to do this more than twice a week if you're super
fit if you're an athlete if you're pursuing a specific goal maybe do it three times a week but
ideally i think twice a week and very often i read a magazine or i see a video where they're talking
about a 45 minute high intensity interval training circuit well if you can do it for 45 minutes
even if it's intervals within there you're not really meeting the criteria that we talked about
because if you can do it for 45 minutes then you're not failing now something i used to do
when i was an athlete preparing for the olympics i did a lot of sprints and one workout that i did
probably two to three times a week especially during the hard period was six times 150 meters
that was a good distance for me because it was short enough that i could do several of them
but it was long enough that i could get my heart rate up to maximum so i would do a
warm-up to get myself ready to get my body up to that level of performance to that intensity then
i would run all out 150 meters and that meant about 17 and a half to 18 seconds when i was at
my best and during that 18 seconds i would hit a maximum heart rate it would get 220 or above
but because it was so intense and i wanted to do six of these i needed a good amount of rest so i
would take three or four or sometimes even five minutes toward the end of the workout to be able
to do another one at that intensity so the workout might last for 30 minutes but my total high
intensity training was less than two minutes this video is not the list about the best exercises
these are examples to help you understand how you can make up your own number seven is
running in place so this may not be as intense as some of the others but the beauty of it is you can
do it anytime you can do it at home you don't need any specific equipment and it's very very simple
so the key though is to work your arms and i'll show you a couple of videos to demonstrate that
if you're really fit you can bring your knees up to raise the intensity if you're not so fit
then don't worry about the high knees here's an example of what i don't recommend he is pretty
much static there are no large movements he's going fast but he's not involving any large
muscle groups his arms are pretty much still don't do it this way and don't do it this way either
this guy has no motion from the shoulder it's all at the elbow and he is not lifting his knees at
all he's using his hamstrings only but here's what you want it to look like look at the shoulders
look at the large dynamic movements the high knees he's using all the large muscle groups in his body
number eight is another classic burpees you can do them with weights you can do without weights you
can do jumping jacks you can jump straight now the beauty of this i think is to use your body weight
so i don't really see the purpose of using extra weights and here's a girl who does a really nice
job she's keeping her back straight when she's in the plank position and she is jumping up she's
extending far she's getting a lot of big muscle groups involved and if you really push off and
jump you could hit some high heart rate very very quickly on this number nine is one of my favorites
it's probably what i do the most which is sprints and you can do them upstairs you can do them
uphill you can do them on an incline treadmill or you can do it on a flat surface like a track
now the beauty of doing it uphill is that you have gravity working against you so you don't have
to go as fast because the faster you go the more likely that you get injured that you pull a muscle
or you get out of control here's a great example of doing it in a park somewhere he's got really
good form he's pumping his arms he's lifting his knees and he's getting some really good
intensity working against gravity makes it easier to get tired and hit exercise number 10 would be
squat jumps again a beautiful exercise that you don't need any special equipment as long as you're
fit enough to do it you can do it with your legs together with your feet side by side or you can do
it like a split or a lunge jump and here's a girl showing really good form she's got her heels on
the ground she's going straight up and down with full extension my only reservation on this one is
that it might be a little hard on the knees to go that deep into a squat i might stop that a little
bit earlier this guy using splits is not extending as far up but you can surely exhaust yourself
very quickly with this exercise. If you enjoyed this video, you'll love that one and if you truly
want to master health, by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit
that bell, and turn on all the notifications, so you never miss a life-saving video.