6 week fat loss

High-intensity interval training offers a highly effective (and highly sweaty) fast track to fat loss. Read on for everything you need to know about building fat-loss workouts, then follow our detailed step-by-step plan that will transform your body in six weeks

High-intensity interval training, or HIIT, has become popular in recent years and - unlike some fitness fads - there's a lot of evidence to support its effectiveness as a training system. One of the benefits that you don't need a degree in exercise science to understand is that HIIT workouts tend to be short. Most of the sessions over the folowing pages come in at around 20 minutes.

For most people, a short HIIT workout is a far more attractive option than spending an hour in the gym or pounding the pavements endlessly. In fact, in a recent study published in the journal Topics in Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation, researchers found that when they asked subjects to list their barriers to exercise, "lack of time" was the most common response. Similarly, if motivation is a problem, HIIT could be the answer because the intense, dynamic and challenging nature of the workouts mean that they are always engaging - you'll get tired, for sure, but you won't be bored.

Some solid scientific data backs up the idea of using HIIT for fat loss. One study, published in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness, compared conventional gym training with HIIT training and found that "HIIT resulted in significantly greater reduction in both abdominal girth and visceral adiposity compared with conventional training". The same study also found that HIIT had a positive impact on total body fat, hand grip strength, sprint endurance, jumping ability and flexibility.