Eighty years ago, two Germans figured out a brilliant way to burn fat fast.
Back in the 1930s, a German doctor and a track coach got together and invented this brilliant training technique.
The athletes sprinted 200 meters and rested for a short time. 
Then they did again. A 200-meter sprint followed by a short period of rest. And again.
It worked. Their students broke world record after world record. Roger Banister, the first man to run the mile in under 4 minutes, used this workout.
It was a breakthrough in fitness. They were the first to see that doing a short burst of activity followed by rest is the best way to exercise.
But here’s the deal, you have to be as fit as an Olympic athlete to do it.
I have a better way. It is accessible to everybody. No matter what your fitness level, you can burn fat in minutes a day.
It’s called interval training. When people hear about my PACE program, they think it’s the same as interval training. And while PACE uses some of the same principles, there’s a major difference.
Few people are conditioned enough to do interval training. Think about the workout they used. Could you sprint the length of two football fields and be ready to do it again after a 90 second break? Probably not.
But you can do PACE.
The secret is progressivity. You don’t have to start with a high intensity workout right off the bat. The idea is to work your way up to it. You just have to tax yourself a little bit more every time you do a set.
One of the breakthroughs of PACE is that you can get the benefits of high intensity training regardless of the level you start at. You can bulletproof your heart, expand your lung capacity, and drop a ton of weight by making small, incremental changes.
Take my patient Terri, for example. I told you her story a couple of months ago. When I first met Terri, the only exercise she could manage was to walk 45 seconds. So that’s what we did. I didn’t make Terri do wind sprints. We worked at her level. The only thing I asked of Terri is to push herself a little more each time.
It’s those incremental improvements, or progressivity, that helped Terri get back in shape. Now she’s running. And biking. And swimming laps. She tells me that she’s more active than she’s ever been – even when she was a kid!
Terri stuck with PACE because she started to see results fast. Now she’s showing her friends how to do PACE.
To get started yourself, pick an activity that you like to do. It just needs to be something that will give your heart and lungs a bit of a challenge. I like bicycling and swimming because they avoid overuse injuries. What you do will depend on your level of fitness. Here are some guidelines:
- Do a light warm up and stretch before each exercise session.
- Start with 20 minutes every other day. (This averages to only 10 minutes per day).
- Start easy and increase gradually.
- As you get into better shape, you will increase the intensity in each session.
- Begin breaking those 20 minutes into shorter “mini-intervals” of exercise and rest.
- Use briefer and briefer episodes of gradually increasing intensity.
- A light activity “cool down” for a couple of minutes has been shown to reduce muscle soreness after exercise.
As it gets easier, focus on increasing the intensity. In other words, as your body adapts, step it up a notch. You shouldn’t be lightheaded. Feeling slightly winded and panting is what you’re looking for.