Is It Better to Do a Few Long Workouts or Short, Frequent Ones?

It is well established that movement is one of the keys to living well and staying healthy. Whether you train competitively or just for fun hardly matters: what counts is staying active. According to the WHO (World Health Organization), physical activity means any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that requires energy expenditure – including activities done while working, playing, doing household chores, traveling and engaging in recreational pursuits. The American guidelines from 2008, along with the international ones, recommend doing moderate-intensity physical activity for at least 150 minutes a week (about 30 minutes a day, almost every day) or 75 minutes a week of vigorous activity (but without overdoing it), to get a meaningful health benefit, split into bouts of no less than 10 consecutive minutes. A hectic life packed with work and social commitments can make it hard to fit in workouts and, above all, to organize our days; we don’t always have enough time to devote to physical activity.

 

Do I get better results from short or long workouts?

To answer this question we need to be clear about the goal that drives us to exercise. If by results you mean better health, as mentioned above, there is no difference between long and short workouts, what matters is reaching the 150 minutes a week mark. If, on the other hand, our goal is to lose weight, build muscle mass, improve performance or boost endurance, we need to make some distinctions.

 

Weight loss

For years, the literature and countless experts in the field recommended aerobic training for weight loss, especially for losing fat mass. In cardiovascular aerobic exercise, in the fitness world, the lipolytic zone, also called the fat-burning zone, is the range of intensity at which the highest rate of lipid oxidation occurs. In general, the training percentage of heart rate at which lipolysis is most pronounced is recognized as between 65 and 75% of HRmax according to the Karvonen formula, or between 60 and 65% of VO2max. Lipolysis of stored lipids (triglycerides) would be reached after at least 20 minutes of sustained activity, because at the start of exercise other energy reserves are tapped instead of fat.

This idea is now outdated: for years the scientific literature has disproved these theories, showing that high-intensity cardiovascular activity (with a significant or predominant anaerobic component) can be just as effective as, or more effective than, aerobic work for weight loss in terms of fat mass reduction. In other words, even if lipids are used more as an energy source during aerobic training, this theory does not take into account other metabolic and physiological mechanisms involved in long-term fat mass reduction, which can also be effectively triggered by more intense activity. Very often, in fact, another very important factor is overlooked, namely post-exercise calorie expenditure (EPOC), which leans more heavily on fat burning and turns out to be greater after high-intensity exercise than after traditional moderate- or low-intensity aerobics.

 

Is it better to run or to walk?

Let’s look at a few concrete examples to see in practical terms which activity is best for losing weight.

Running:

• Calorie expenditure = 0.9 x kilometers covered x kg of lean body mass (that is, everything left of the body once the fat mass is removed);
• Fat use = (kg of body weight x kilometers covered) / 20

Walking:

• Calorie expenditure = 0.5 x kilometers covered x kg of lean body mass (that is, everything left of the body once the fat mass is removed);
• Fat use = (kg of body weight x kilometers covered) / 35

A person with 70 kg of lean mass who covers 10 km will burn about 630 kcal running and 350 kcal walking the same route, using 30-35 grams of fat. Not everyone knows, however, that 1 kg of fat contains about 7000 kcal, i.e. 800 g of energy-yielding lipids (plus water, cells and so on). We can therefore easily calculate that, to eliminate 1 kg of adipose tissue, this person would have to walk about 240 km, or 24 consecutive days of training – if they manage to cover 10 km every single day. This result shows that aerobic training does not have as big an impact on fat burning as has always been believed.

 

Improving endurance

If our goal is to prepare for a middle-distance race, medium-to-long aerobic training is definitely what we need. Many studies have shown that high-intensity training can significantly improve our endurance, but it is also true that to perform well and, above all, be ready for competition, our body needs long workouts that are as close as possible to the duration of our race. Moreover, to improve physical endurance, our body needs to be able to tap into all those energy “reserves” stored in the body in the form of glycogen and fat. This is precisely why a workout should last at least 40-50 minutes, so as to train our metabolic system to use all the energy reserves we have.

 

Conclusions

As we have seen, physical activity plays a hugely important role in our health and in body recomposition. Ultimately, since 60% of daily calorie expenditure comes from basal metabolism, it would be counterproductive, when weight loss is the goal, to draw up a training protocol that doesn’t include strength sessions, because muscle hypertrophy is responsible for a higher metabolic cost at rest.

That’s why the strategies considered winning are always mixed and include endurance aerobic training as well as anaerobic muscle-building sessions (growth of muscle mass). Our advice is to alternate short, higher-intensity sessions of 20-30 minutes with longer, moderate-intensity workouts, so you can best manage your weekly commitments and avoid the risk of overtraining caused by workouts that are too intense and too close together.

Finally, don’t forget the impact that a healthy, proper diet has on our health. To get results, especially lasting ones, our diet must be balanced, taking into account all the activities we carry out during the day and, above all, our workouts. Eathlon®, thanks to the scientific method it is based on, is definitely the right ally to help us achieve results and improve our health. The Mediterranean Diet and the choice of different preparations will provide all the vitamins and minerals needed to stay active throughout the day and keep the right intensity for our workouts.

 

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Author

MATTEO ZOFFOLI

Graduate in Sport Sciences, personal trainer, fitness instructor and professional strength and conditioning coach. He is a fitness consultant and an expert in functional training.