No time to excercise? Here’s a surprising way to produce growth hormone, and lose fat and increase muscle in the process

I haven’t gone to the gym in years.  With a growing family and a full time job, I just really didn’t have the time nor the money.  But lately, whenever I come across people who I haven’t seen in quite a while, just about all of them give me the same response:  “Have you been working out lately?  You’ve gotten bigger/fitter.” 

It puzzled me a bit that I get that kind of a response.  But then, a light bulb lit, and I suddenly remember a series of articles that I read in one of my favorite health and wellness sites.  These articles told of a surprising way to produce growth hormone, and when you do this, fat loss and increased muscle mass is the result. The method the article focused on is gold, especially to those of us who have no time to exercise.

Before what I tell you what the articles contained, I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing every morning:  I walk my dog.  More accurately, Shrek, a really big and active fur ball, runs me…to the ground.  

The usual routine every morning is that we would burst out our front gate with both of us running at full sprint.  Not walking.  Not jogging.  Full sprint.  We’d keep this up for about several seconds and about half the street’s length.  He’d then stop and find a good place or two to sniff around and do his business, then after several seconds of that, we’d break out into a sprint once again to the next spot.  So my exercise and dog walking program consists of several periods of intense activity followed by rest.  In case you’re wondering, the subdivision we live in has lots of vacant lots, so there wouldn’t be any angry neighbors with poop filled lawns.

What does this have to do with producing growth hormone?  Well, the articles talk about high intensity interval training, which is just like what I described: periods of intense activitiy, the most you can do before getting out of breath, then periods of rest.  The site’s name for their particular program is Peak 8, meaning eight intervals of this routine, which in turn is based on the author’s interview and collaboration with fitness author Phil Campbell, who wrote Ready, Set, GO!

This practice will give you one heck of a workout for far less time you’d spend jogging or doing other cardio, which is awesome for guys like me who don’t have a lot of free time juggling our responsibilities of being dads, husbands, and bringing home the bacon.

Better yet, this kind of high intensity interval training naturally increases your body’s production of growth hormone.  The website I found the info from says that high intensity training engages the super-fast muscle fibers, which are the main ones responsible for the growth hormone production.  This, in turn decreases body fat, improves your muscle tone, and helps you reach your fitness goals much faster, among many other benefits.

So, I guess walking my dog has great payoffs.  I mean, who wouldn’t want, in your effort to have a poop-free lawn, increased growth hormone production, leading to less fat and increased muscle mass?  Plus, you get it done in less time to boot.  Now that people are noticing, maybe this is my cue to start hitting the weights again, after oh so long.