HIIT promotes greater EPOC than jogging even though jogging burns higher% of fat of calories burned. Overall, HIIT wins out.
It’s a big mistake to drastically cut down calories and add tons of cardio at the same time. That will kick your ass after one week. Maybe sooner. The best way to do it is just simply clean up your diet, figure out how much calories you are taking in and reduce it by 10-20% on carbs and/or fat. Or keep your diet and gradually add more cardio to burn extra calories.
Calories in - calories out.
BigTim-
This can be debated for decades. I think it’s all about what you will be motivated to do and what you plan on dieting with. If you diet down strictly by way of the ketogenic path, you will likely not have enough carbs to recovery from both a weight workout 3Xweek and HIIT 3Xweek. However, if you just reduced your carbs to say 30-40% of your diet and ate them mostly PWO and in the AM, than I think HIIT is the way to go.
That being said, if you are one of the few who can manage to stay sane while enduring 40-60 minutes of stead-state cardio, 3Xweek, than I think that is your best bet from a LBM preservation stand point. Especially because your lifting should be intense in order to help retain LBM, it’s tough to go high intensity 5-6 days out of the week. You can easily over-train. I have done this. Not fun. And, to make it worse, fat loss may even slow to a dull roar during all this, so your efforts might be for not… which really pisses you off after busting hump.
I personally have found a 2-3 pound/week fat loss and decent LBM retention with Charles Staley’s EDT (3Xweek), 2 sessions of low-intensity cardio (heart BPM sub 65%) for 45 min and one elliptical semi-HIIT session for 25 minutes, all on non-lifting days. I use T-Dawg 2.0 with Sunday’s completely off, consuming maint. calories. I’m one who can just barely stand 45 minutes of low-intensity cardio, but I don’t have the gas to go all-out HIIT because the EDT is brutal!
There’s my two,
TopSirloin