Old school fat loss is out, and new school fat burning workouts are in. Shocking research from Australia shows that short, interval training workouts are more effective for fat burning than long, slow aerobic cardio workouts.

In the study conducted at the University of New South Wales, women who used interval training lost more belly fat than women doing cardio – even though the cardio workouts were twice as long!

It is difficult to believe that you can cut your workout time. Most people were used to doing long, slow cardio workouts. Every book, every magazine, and every other trainer they ever talked to always said they needed to do long cardio workouts to burn fat – sometimes trainers even said they had to do the workouts first thing in the morning on an empty stomach!

A recent study conducted by the University of New South Wales on 45 overweight people, concluded that high intensity interval training promotes weight loss up to three times faster than plain aerobic training. The research also showed that you only need to exercise for half the amount of time!

High intensity exercise burns more calories. A calorie is a measure of energy. If you burn more calories in a day than you consume, you lose weight. It is as simple as that. High intensity exercise over a given period burns more calories than low intensity exercise. You may burn a lower percentage of fat, but you burn more calories, and will lose more weight as a result.

High intensity training will also increase your metabolism, resulting in fat stores being broken down after exercise has stopped to replenish the carbohydrate stores in the muscles. Therefore you are burning fat even after you stop exercising.

Here are three of the interval training workouts for fat burning. (Make sure you do a thorough warm-up before and a cool-down after each workout.)

8/12 second exercise

This interval program is copied straight from the Australian research study that found the best way to burn belly fat was to use intervals, not long, slow cardio. Subjects in this study trained three times per week, and alternated between 8 seconds of hard exercise and 12 seconds of easy exercise for 20 full minutes.

This workout is tough to do on cardio equipment at your gym because it is hard to speed up and slow down so fast. But you can do this with a jump rope, or by running in place, or you can do it outside running or biking.

The tricky part of this style of training is often timing the intervals. Whilst you could just look at your watch or a clock, this takes your focus away from the task at hand. This is where the WorkoutTimer steps in.

After telling the WorkoutTimer how long you would like each interval, it will beep (or vibrate, or both) at you each time you need to switch from fast -> slow or vice-versa. This alarm will keep going off at the end of each interval as many times as you like.

Alternating your workout intensity is more beneficial than steady state cardio, because of the metabolism boost post-exercise. For example, walking at 3 MPH for 30 minutes might burn the same amount of calories as walking as alternating between 2 and 4 MPH for the same period of time, but the latter will burn more calories in the long run, because it forces your body to work a bit harder.

In the case of interval training, you push your body to maximum effort, take a short recovery period, and then repeat the process. This can do wonders for your metabolism, keeping it elevated for quite a few hours after exercise.

High Intensive Interval Training is also the training regimen that Olympic athletes use to train. It is quite effective, but you need a decent fitness base first.