Sharny 15 Minute Exercise Results Interview

Sharny 15 Minute Exercise Results Interview

Exercising for over an hour will give you fewer results than exercising for 15 minutes, experts say.

Australian fitness experts Sharny and Julius have made the bold claim that if you are exercising for more than 15 minutes, your results will disappoint you.

The claim comes off the back of the release of their popular obstacle racer training program, 8 week Athlete, which substitutes long workouts for short and strategic exercises.

Many gym goers believe that they need to exercise for at least an hour to get results. The duo, who have made headlines for their no nonsense approach to obesity; believe that this perception has been manufactured by the fitness industry.

Julius said 'Working out for an hour suits a gym trainer, or gym owner because they can charge for a whole hour. It doesn't suit the patron, because they can get the result they are after in less than 15 minutes. In fact, if they are working out for an hour, their intensity is not optimal for fat loss or fitness."

'We used to believe the theory too, and it suited us with our fitness studio, but when we took our focus off making money, instead helping people achieve results, we realised we had been self-serving".

The idea is that intensity (elevated heart rate) is what demands fat loss, not endurance (which has a storage effect on body fat, while stripping muscle).

Sharny and Julius' top tips for losing fat:
Running for an hour burns off only 2 slices of bread- instead, exercise for a shorter period of time at peak intensity. This forces your body to release fat burning hormones.
You only need to exercise for 5 -15 minutes to get to peak intensity
Fat burning hormones make your body burn fat for 24-48 hours after exercise
You can never out exercise a gluttonous diet- fat burning starts in the kitchen not the gym

The next round of Sharny and Julius' online obstacle racer program, 8 week Athlete starts on July 8th (Monday).

To learn more about Sharny and Julius' philosophy on weight, health and fitness or to register for 8 week athlete please visit www.sharnyandjulius.com.

Interview with Sharny

Question: Why will exercising for over an hour give us fewer results than exercising for 15 minutes?

Sharny: Firstly, in a demand driven, time poor society, it is only broke people and seriously committed people who can sacrifice the time to exercise for an hour. Getting to the gym, warming up, cooling down, showering, spare clothes etc all add up. Throw in a one hour workout and you've got to set aside at least 90 minutes out of your day for a workout.

Ask a working mum to take 90 minutes out of her day and it's no wonder they aren't turning up. Now, let's say you do have the time management of a drill sergeant and the commitment to get to the gym and do a one hour workout; unfortunately, that one hour workout is 45 minutes too long.

Have you ever seen that table listing foods on the left; combined (in the right column) by how many hours of exercise we would need to do to burn them off? One doughnut = 30km running? Well, that table only tells you part of the story. It tells you how much you burn while you are running. It doesn't take into account the additional energy used by the body in the time after you finish running.

While it is easy to calculate how much you burn during exercise, it is a lot harder to predict how much you will burn after you exercise and for how long. What we do know is that it is not distance or time that dictate post exercise metabolic increase (PEMI). It is exercise intensity.

PEMI means that your usual daily metabolic needs have increased, due to exercise. How much fuel you need to keep going has increased. If you don't consume that fuel, your body will get it from your fat stores. PEMI = fat loss. The higher the intensity of your exercise, the longer PEMI lasts; and PEMI burns far, far more fuel (fat) than the exercise itself.

Jogging, for example, has nearly zero PEMI. Once you stop jogging, you go back to a sedentary fat loss state. Sprinting on the other hand, has a huge PEMI. For up to 48 hours after a sprinting session, you will have a large PEMI. If you have to work out for anything over about 5 minutes, your body will put a limit on your intensity. It will force itself to hold back so that you can make the whole hour without losing bodily function, suffering rhabdomyolysis or cardiac arrest.

It is intensity of exercise that dictates PEMI, and no human can sustain high intensity for longer than 15 minutes without catastrophic failure. And it's not just fat loss. If you want to get fitter or stronger, it is intensity that will get you there, not how long you do it for.


Question: When and how did you change your beliefs that working out for 15 minutes was better than an hour?

Sharny: This principle is so important to us that we tell this exact story in our book FITlosophy 1. It's a story about one of our clients who had run out of time, so forced himself to blast through a traditional one hour strength session in 10 minutes.

So impressive were his results from that one session alone that we decided to try it. Our results skyrocketed (not only physically, but emotionally and mentally), that we just decided to look deeper into this phenomenon and give this type of workouts to our clients.

As fitness people and parents, shorter workouts with accelerated results are the holy grail, and as a result of our research and the emergence of brands like crossfit, people all around the world now know and experience the benefits of these shorter workouts.

Big gyms know this too, but they don't promote it because it would be business suicide. You can't charge the same for a 15 minute workout as you do for a one hour personal training session; so they don't tell you and you become the victim.


Question: What types of exercise for 15 minutes would achieve better results than an hour of exercise?

Sharny: Well, we all know that interval training leads to PEMI. People like to call it EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) but EPOC is only part of the equation, much better to focus on PEMI.
What we have worked out (over years of studying and perfecting this subject) is that optimal PEMI happens when we do full body exercises (swimming, running, burpees, jack jumps etc.) instead of isolation exercises.

Take it to another level and really increase PEMI, we simply add resistance (weights). Doing high intensity full body resistance exercise uncaps the limit to an athlete's potential.


Question: Why is an elevated heart rate for a shorter period of time more effective on fat loss?

Sharny: Think about your heart rate as a tachometer (rev counter in a car). At low to medium revs (intensity), nothing out of the ordinary happens – no matter how far you go. But rev your car right up and all the lights on the dash start flashing, the car starts shuddering.

In the human body, red lining intensity does the same thing – all the lights start flashing and your body starts to shudder. But where are car and a human differ is that a human body will now work to prevent that level of intensity happening again – it will power up the engine and the chassis, so to speak. To do so requires energy. Fat.


Question: What is peak intensity?

Sharny: Depending on your fitness level, 220 minus your age is your theoretical heart rate maximum. We know of some athletes who exceed it quite often and that's OK, but you can red line just below max heart rate and still have high intensity by doing it with resistance.

So heart rate + resistance = intensity. If you have little or no resistance, a fit person can exceed their theoretical max heart rate. If you have resistance, you don't need to.


Question: Which of these 15 minute peak intensity exercise can be done at home?

Sharny: Our 8 week athlete program was designed so that people can do almost all of the workouts at home – for athletes on the program, they get 8 weeks of pre-programmed PEMI workouts, matched with strategic rest days for maximum results.

For a simple one you can do on your own; time yourself for 50 burpees (chest, thighs and stomach to the floor, jump and reach as high as you can). The best we've seen from a female athlete is just over 2 minutes.

Question: Can you tell us about the 8 week Athlete?

Sharny: It started because we were training ironman athletes to be prepared in less than 8 weeks. Using these principles, we managed to get quite a few first time ironmen and women over the line, and many veterans an hour or two off their PB.

Recently, we've seen the emergence of obstacle course racing, and scouring the web for training plans produced similar results to traditional triathlon training – coaches were telling people to essentially practice the event.

Many people simply don't have the time, let alone the physical capacity to sustain such enormous volumes of exercise. Many Tough Mudder and Spartan athletes had been coming to us because they had repetitive strain injuries from training, and had heard about the results our athletes were getting in less than a tenth of the time. They loved the sport, but just couldn't train for it.

After some fine tuning, we took our 8 week athlete program and released it online as a video training course, complete with workout plans and athletic nutritional lessons. We have been overwhelmed by the response, and more importantly the staggering results people are getting from it, now that it is available outside of our home town!


Question: How does the book substitute long workouts for short and strategic exercises?

Sharny: When we first designed the program, we asked our obstacle athletes what they wanted to achieve; which was speed around the course; for minimum effective time commitment. These people aren't lazy, they just don't have the time, so we then set about building the most time efficient training program for that exact purpose. Anything that was not necessary (filler exercises) was stripped out. What we had left was a masterpiece.

A program that takes a person to the fittest they have ever been in their life, no matter what their starting fitness level, by only training them as much as they need. For the competitive obstacle racers, the speed, endurance and efficiency to conquer the most challenging event with near miraculous recovery was a bonus. No exhaustion on the day – just fun.


Question: How do fat burning hormones make your body burn fat for 24-48 hours after exercise?

Sharny: Back to the tachometer, when we red line and all the lights on the dash start flashing? One of those lights is just below the hypothalamus, it's called the pituitary gland. As a protective mechanism, it releases a few important hormones – HGH and TSH; which together form what is called the 'fountain of youth". The ability to mobilise and use the body's fat stores for energy. The chemical pathways are complex, and there are many more hormones secreted, but these two along with Oxytocin give us the biggest body composition bang for buck. Oxytocin release is why we feel so happy after intense exercise (and orgasm).


Question: How do we activate the fat burning hormones?

Sharny: High intensity full body resistance exercise.


Question: What changes do we need to make in the kitchen to have the best fat bruning results?

Sharny: When you are exercising like this, your body will naturally crave more food. Habit is what will make you choose junk food or high GI carbs. But high intensity this is very hard to sustain on a belly full of pasta bake, so diet will generally take care of itself.

We find that the best diet is high in vegetables, with little to no fruit, sugar or starch; and meat or cheese once or twice a day. Eating this way allows our athletes faster recovery time, reduced soreness and very fast excess fat loss.

To be honest, the fat drops off very quickly until the body becomes athletic. Fat bouncing around becomes a hindrance and is swiftly dealt with by the body.

The process doesn't take long.

What does take the time is explaining to your friends and family how eating a salad for breakfast is giving you far more energy than you ever have before, and why you are commandeering the local playground for some crazy workout routine that lasts less than 15 minutes.


Interview by Brooke Hunter