The calorie burning secrets hiding in your everyday workout.

If you are going to lace up your trainers, you may as well get a little more from the effort. The trick, according to sports scientist Rhodri Whittaker of Absolute Body Solutions gyms, is intensity. You do not necessarily need to exercise for longer, but you can make parts of your workout harder. That might mean adding short bursts of speed to a run, increasing the resistance on your bike or walking quickly enough to make you feel as though you are late for a meeting you really should have prepared for. Whittaker points out that you burn calories simply by being alive, but the harder you work during exercise, the more energy you use. There is a catch, though. Burning calories is not quite the same thing as losing body fat, which ultimately requires a calorie deficit.

For running, intervals are one of the simplest ways to increase the work you are doing without turning your entire session into a grim endurance test. Whittaker recommends four minutes at a very hard pace followed by four minutes of walking or slow jogging, repeated four times. The idea is not simply to suffer heroically for half an hour. Hard efforts can also produce excess post exercise oxygen consumption, commonly known as EPOC, meaning your body continues using energy as it recovers. According to  figures, a 30-minute interval session could burn around 380 to 450 calories, compared with about 300 to 360 for a steady 5km pace run. You can apply the same principle to walking by alternating three or four minutes of fast walking with three or four minutes of easier recovery, potentially raising the estimated burn from around 110 to 140 calories to 160 to 220 calories in 30 minutes.

Cycling can get the same treatment, although you may have to leave your bicycle briefly. Keiren Douglas of Nuffield Health in Aberdeen suggests combining short, flat out bursts on a stationary bike with simple strength exercises such as squats, walking lunges and a kettlebell carry. It is not exactly a leisurely pedal through the park, but the combination keeps your heart rate elevated while involving more muscles. The estimated difference is substantial, with the article putting a 30-minute cross training session at around 300 to 380 calories, compared with 210 to 260 for steady indoor cycling. If you are cycling outdoors, Whittaker suggests changing your tempo or using hills, rather than settling into one comfortable speed for the entire ride.

There is another useful lesson here, and it involves resisting the temptation to make every workout an all out battle. Douglas says you want most of your calorie burn to come from everyday movement and warns that pushing exercise intensity too far can leave you so tired that you spend the rest of the day on the sofa. That is hardly an impressive calorie burning strategy.

So think in terms of strategic effort rather than maximum suffering. Add a few faster sections to your walk, introduce intervals into your run, increase resistance on your bike and keep moving between exercises when strength training. The aim is to make your workout more demanding without making yourself so exhausted that the rest of your day becomes an extended recovery session.