High-Intensity-Interval-Training increases fat burning more than aerobic exercise. In fact, a few sessions of HIIT per week will turn your body into a fat-burning “machine.”

High-Intensity Interval Training Can Help Burn More Fat

“If that stubborn body fat isn’t going away, consider adding High-Intensity-Interval-Training or HIIT to your exercise routine,” says Professor Zeljko Pedisic.

HIIT increases fat burning more than aerobic exercise, finds a study that was recently published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

How was the study conducted?

For the study, researchers pooled results from 18 controlled intervention trials on the effects of HIIT on the rate of fat burning during exercise.

The intervention trials included a total of 511 adult participants who were engaged in either supervised HIIT, moderate-intensity aerobic exercise, or a non-exercising control group.

The duration of exercise interventions ranged from 2 to 14 weeks. In almost all of the studies, participants engaged in three HIIT sessions per week.

What are the key findings?

According to the research, a few sessions of HIIT per week will turn your body into a fat-burning “machine.” HIIT will make you start burning more fat not just during the HIIT sessions, but also during other types of physical activity, such as brisk walking, swimming, and playing sports.

Fat metabolism will improve after only four weeks of HIIT, and it will continue to improve over time.

After 12 weeks of HIIT, each minute of physical activity can be expected to burn an additional 0.13 grams of fat. For someone who engages in 150 minutes of physical activity per week, this could lead to around 10 kg (22 pounds) of additional fat burned in a decade.

According to the findings, overweight individuals may expect greater increases in fat burning, compared with “normal”-weight individuals.


While people could also improve their fat metabolism by engaging in aerobic exercise (e.g. jogging), this would require a much higher time commitment, and the improvements would be smaller.

Why is this important?

These findings may help more than two billion overweight people in the world to improve their fat metabolism and reduce weight.

They may also help billions of others to prevent unwanted weight gain over time.

Picture your 10-year older self with additional 22 pounds of body fat: HIIT may help you avoid such a change in the body composition.

“According to the recent Worldwide Survey of Fitness Trends, HIIT is among the most popular types of workouts. If you are not already doing it, maybe you should give it a go,” concludes Professor Pedisic.


Reference: “Effects of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) and sprint interval training (SIT) on fat oxidation during exercise: a systematic review and meta-analysis” by Muhammed M Atakan, Yasemin Guzel, Nipun Shrestha, Sukran N Kosar, Jozo Grgic, Todd A Astorino, Huseyin H Turnagol and Zeljko Pedisic, 20 July 2022, British Journal of Sports Medicine.
DOI: 10.1136/bjsports-2021-105181

Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite images show the stark difference between August 2021 and August 2022 on the Rhine River near Cologne.

Water levels on the Rhine River, Europe’s second-largest river, have continued to due to soaring temperatures and lack of rainfall. The low water levels are preventing many vessels from navigating through the waters at full capacity. The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission captured satellite images of part of the Rhine River near Cologne. They show the stark difference between August 2021 and August 2022.

Flowing from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea, the Rhine River is an important shipping route for many products from grains to chemicals to coal. When water levels drop, cargo vessels need to sail with reduced load, so they don’t run aground.

Rhine River on August 25, 2021. Credit: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Water levels at the chokepoint of Kaub, near Frankfurt, fell to 32 cm (13 inches) in depth on Monday, down from 42 cm (17 inches) last week. Ships, however, need around 1.5 m (5 feet) to be able to sail fully loaded. This means that current levels are making it difficult for larger ships to navigate through the waters. Freight ships continue to sail, but only with around 25% to 35% of the ship’s capacity.

The low water levels are emerging earlier than usual, with the lowest water levels typically recorded in September or October. However, reduced temperatures and predicted rainfall forecasted for this week may offer much-needed relief to the Rhine.

Rhine River on August 12, 2022. Credit: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2022), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The phenomenon facing the Rhine is common across much of Europe after an unusually hot and dry summer, which caused wildfires and water shortages.

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites capture high-resolution imagery that provide information about the conditions on Earth, such as plant life, soil, and coastal areas. The mission consists of two satellites both of which carry an innovative multispectral imager – a camera that captures optical images over a range of wavelengths beyond visible light.

A scanning electron microscopy image of a Kamptozoa, a small aquatic invertebrate. Credit: Dr. Natalia Shunatova. Credit: Dr. Natalia Shunatova

Research suggests that the Kamptozoa and Bryozoa phyla split sooner than previously believed.

Kamptozoa and Bryozoa are two phyla of small aquatic invertebrates. They are related to snails and clams (mollusks), bristle worms, earthworms, and leeches (annelids), as well as ribbon worms (nemertea). Evolutionary biologists have long been baffled by their exact place on the tree of life and how closely linked these other species are to them. Previous research regularly shifted their place around.

Furthermore, despite the fact that Kamptozoa and Bryozoa were once thought to belong in one group, they were later separated due to their appearance and anatomy. Now, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), working with associates from St. Petersburg University and Tsukuba University, have demonstrated that the two phyla split from mollusks and worms earlier than previous studies had suggested, and thus they do in fact form a distinct group. This discovery was made possible by the use of cutting-edge sequencing technology and powerful computational analysis.


“We’ve shown that by using high-quality transcriptomic data we can answer a long-standing question to the best of our current techniques,” said Dr. Konstantin Khalturin, Staff Scientist in OIST’s Marine Genomics Unit and first author of the paper published in Science Advances.

Dr. Konstantin Khalturin and Professor Nori Satoh are two of the researchers involved in this study. Credit: OIST

A genome is the full set of genetic information found in every cell. It is subdivided into genes. These genes are made up of DNA base pairs and each gene contains the instructions needed to create a protein and thus leads to the proper care and maintenance of a cell. For the instructions to be carried out, the DNA must first be transcribed into RNA. A transcriptome is the result of this, like the reflection of a genome but written in RNA base pairs rather than DNA.


This genetic information differs among species. Those who are closely related have very similar genetic information, while a greater evolutionary distance results in more genetic differences. By using this data, researchers have improved our knowledge of animal evolution, but some questions still prove difficult to answer.

As Kamptozoa and Bryozoa are closely related to mollusks, annelids, and nemertea, small mistakes in the dataset, or missing data, can result in an incorrect placement on the evolutionary tree. Furthermore, while collecting these tiny animals, it’s easy to pick up other organisms, such as algae, that contaminate the sample. Dr. Khalturin highlighted that they were careful to avoid contamination and later screened their dataset for RNA of algae and small animals to remove any that might have come from them.

The evolutionary relationships of Kamptozoa and Bryozoa and their place on the tree of life have been revealed in this new study. The study found that they split from mollusks and worms earlier than expected and that they are part of a distinct group, called Polyzo. Credit: OIST

In total, the researchers sequenced the transcriptome of four species of Kamptozoa and two species of Bryozoa, but to a far higher quality level than had previously been achieved. While past datasets had completeness of 20-60%, in this study, the transcriptome completeness was over 96%.


Using these transcriptomes, they predicted proteins and compared them to similar data of 31 other species, some of which were closely related to Kamptozoa and Bryozoa, such as clams and bristle worms, and others that were more distant, such as frogs, starfish, insects, and jellyfish. The high-quality datasets meant that they could compare many different genes and proteins simultaneously. Dr. Khalturin credited the powerful computational capabilities that the researchers could access at OIST.

“Our main finding is that the two phyla belong together,” said Dr. Khalturin. “This result was originally proposed in the 19th century by biologists who were grouping animals based on what they looked like.”

While Dr. Khalturin stated that this question had now been answered to the best ability available, he also highlighted that the dataset could answer other fundamental evolutionary questions—such as the more precise location of mollusks and annelids on the tree of life, and how life diversified.

Reference: “Polyzoa is back: The effect of complete gene sets on the placement of Ectoprocta and Entoproc” by Konstantin Khalturin, Natalia Shunatova, Sergei Shchenkov, Yasunori Sasakura, Mayumi Kawamitsu and Noriyuki Satoh, 1 July 2022, Science Advances.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo4400

More than two million nights of sleep and blood pressure were examined by the researchers.

Inconsistencies in sleep time and length were linked to a higher risk of hypertension, according to a study that examined more than two million nights of sleep and blood pressure data.

According to the findings, a 9% to 15% higher risk of hypertension was linked to high sleep duration irregularity. Furthermore, a 38-minute increase in sleep midpoint irregularity was linked with an 11% risk increase, while a 31-minute increase in sleep start time irregularity was associated with a 29% risk increase.

“This new approach to noninvasive nightly monitoring of sleep duration and timing in people’s homes for an average period of six months each combined with regular blood pressure monitoring has shown us just how important having a regular sleep routine and getting enough sleep is for your health, in this case, your heart health,” said lead author Hannah Scott, who has a doctorate in sleep health and is a sleep health research associate at the Adelaide Institute for Sleep Health (AISH), Flinders University.

“These novel data shed new light on the restorative benefits of sleep and raise potential concerns for the substantial proportion of shift workers in our modern 24-hour society.”

12,300 volunteers aged 18 to 90 provided data during a nine-month period, which the researchers then analyzed. A portable blood pressure monitor and an under-mattress sleep device were used to capture the metrics. The standard deviation of total sleep time was used to determine the regularity of the sleep duration. Similarly, the standard deviation in sleep onset time and sleep midpoint was used to determine the regularity of sleep timing.

Logistic regressions controlling for age, sex, body mass index, and average total sleep time were conducted to investigate potential associations between sleep regularity and hypertension, which was found in 2,499 participants.

“These new insights into the potential adverse impact of irregular sleep timing and duration on heart health further highlight the importance of the role synchronizing the body clock and prioritizing enough sleep opportunity for optimal health and wellbeing,” said senior author Danny Eckert, who has a doctorate in sleep and respiratory physiology and is professor and director of AISH.

The researchers noted that prior studies of sleep and heart health have been limited in sample size and restricted to a short period of time. The current study investigated associations between sleep regularity and hypertension in a large, global sample over multiple months.

Reference: “0204 Sleep Irregularity Is Associated with Increased Risk of Hypertension: Data From Over Two Million Nights” by Hannah Scott, Bastien Lechat, Amy Reynolds, Nicole Lovato, Pierre Escourrou, Peter Catcheside and Danny Eckert, 25 May 2022, SLEEP.
DOI: 10.1093/sleep/zsac079.202

This was an unfunded investigator-initiated study. Deidentified data were provided by Withings for unrestricted investigator-led analysis. One of the co-authors serves as a consultant for Withings.