The Once-A-Week Workout That Cuts Belly Fat

“Just lose weight” is advice that is not only usually unhelpful in and of itself, but it’s also a big vague. Weight can be a lot of things.

Most of it isn’t even fat! See for example: When BMI Doesn’t Quite Measure Up ← for this and other flaws of the BMI system

There are other methods that are better, such as waist-to-hip ratio (including how to calculate it, and what numbers are ideal (or risky) for women and men, as detailed here: Better Than BMI, and also here: The Other Waist Ratio

With this in mind, some specific kinds of fat are generally considered worse than others. For example, we have previously written about Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It, and while we’re a lot less enthusiastic than many about weight loss in general as a panacea (it’s usually not), it is unequivocally true that visceral belly fat specifically has important health impacts, and for most people most of the time, having less of it is better than having more.

On that note may also be wondering: Can We Do Fat Redistribution? And the answer is yes, and we are doing it all the time whether we want to or not, so we might as well know what things affect our fat distribution in various body parts. The article we just linked there shows how.

So, what’s this about a once-a-week workout that cuts belly fat?

Walk it off

We covered, previously, the question of: Can Walking Really Burn Belly Fat? What Science Says

…but this takes it further!

Researchers (Dr. Heidi Ngai et al.) did a 16-week study to determine whether completing all weekly high-intensity interval training (HIIT) in one 75-minute session is as effective as spreading the same exercise across three weekly sessions for reducing body fat in adults with central adiposity (i.e. belly fat).

For anyone who would like a primer/refresher on what HIIT is, here you go: How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)

In this case, the interval walking program was as follows:

• What they did: brisk interval walking alternating higher-intensity walking with lower-intensity active recovery
• How much they did 75 minutes for both exercise groups, differing only in how the time was distributed
• What they measured: body fat in general, which was assessed by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA), along with body fat percentage, waist circumference, and cardiorespiratory fitness

As for what they found:

❝Compared to CON at week 16, both HIIT groups showed decreased fat mass (adjusted mean differences: H1 vs. CON: −0.8 kg [95% CI: −1.4 to −0.2], P = 0.0107; H3 vs. CON: −1.0 kg [95% CI: −1.6 to −0.5], P = 0.0003).❞

Translating that from sciencese:

• Both kinds of HIIT exercise (one 75-minute session or three 25-minute sessions) worked well and gave significantly decreased central fat mass compared to control
• The 3-times per week version gave a very slightly better result than the once-per-week version on average, but we’re talking a difference between them of 200g over the course of 16 weeks
• Here is where we would normally say “that’s less than a cup; you could pee that much to adjust the number on the scale by the same amount”, but for once this was a study accurately measuring fat mass rather than BMI, so peeing wouldn’t account for it in this case.

In other words: do HIIT in one session or three; it doesn’t really matter; both work very well.

If you really want to optimize it, then yes, three 25-minute sessions are a tiny bit better than one 75-minute session.

You can read the paper in full, here: Once and thrice weekly interval training in adults with central obesity: a randomized controlled trial

This beneficial effect of HIIT walking is very consistent with what we wrote about in our article: The Best Exercise To Reduce Fat AND Retain Muscle In Later Life

Want to lose fat in general?

If so, here’s our main article about that:

How To Lose Weight (Healthily!)

Take care!