Luke Carlson wants to improve your fitness ROI. For better results, he advises, spend less time at the gym.
Carlson is the founder of a gym, the Discover Strength Personal Fitness Center in Plymouth. He’s also a student of physiology, and says recent research supports ditching the exhaustive cardio routines (read “elliptical slavery”) as a productive route to fat loss.
Instead, the trick is to raise the body’s resting metabolic rate—its burn rate for calories—with high-intensity strength training that works the muscles to exhaustion in short bursts, Carlson says. That stimulates a chemical conversion in the cells that builds muscle and in turn improves metabolic function. Because muscle building and tissue repair happen when the body is at rest, time away from the gym is crucial to success.
This is good news for layabouts of all stripes, but also for the pressed-for-time business types who—along with athletes and Minnesota Vikings cheerleaders—make up Carlson’s clientele. He tells them 30 minutes of high-intensity strength training once or twice a week is all they need. In other words, brevity is the soul of fit.
