Al Sears PACE Program

Is anyone familiar with this program?  It's Al Sears' "Progressively Accelerating Cardiopulmonary Exertion, PACE".  Someone posted about it on the Lap Band forum, and it sounds interesting.  I don't want to buy another diet/exercise book, especially since I think I've got the the food part under control, but I've been poking around online to see if I could find just the workout part.  It's basically short duration interval training with increasing intensity and shorter intervals as the workout progresses.  So, a complete workout would be less than 20", and look something like this: 2" at 70% 2" rest at 65% 90 sec. at 75% 2" rest at 65% 60 sec.  80% 2" rest at 65% 40 sec. 85% 2" rest at 65% 30 sec. at 90% 2" rest at 65% Total duration:  15.6" Dr. Sears apparently claims that long duration cardio can actually impair the heart, and even worse (subjectively!) to us who are fighting the battle of the bulge is that it actually encourages your body to hoard fat.  But, I'm not sure what he's referring to as "long duration".  Would that apply to typical cardio workouts of 45"-60", or is that referring to running a marathon? Would love to know if anyone here has done a program like this, and how it compares to traditional cardio workouts, 'cause dang, this sure would save some time.  Even if I do it twice a day, that would be about half of the amount of time I spend doing cardio right now.   I'm going away for the weekend, so forgive me if I don't respond, but I'll catch up with you in a couple of days! Tami

I don't have experience with the PACE program specifically, but it doesn't sound much different than good old-fashioned Heart Rate Zone (i.e. interval) training.  The idea is that you're training your body to start burning fat more efficiently at your 60+% max rate.  You burn more calories per minute the higher your heart rate gets, but you decrease the # of calories that are burned from fat as you push to your max.  Training at these different "zones" for "spikes" of time wakes the body and trains it to start being more comfortable with burning more fat as a % of the total calories per minute. The idea is that it doesn't take a lot of time per session to reap the benefit of this.  Doing it for more than 45 minutes at a time doesn't show any real improvement over ending the session at 20 - 45 minutes. I suspect that's the same idea the PACE program is getting at. I've been doing this interval training for a little over a month, and it's working!