If you’re running to lose fat you’re better of doing sprint sets rather than running distances.
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You’ll shred the fat miles more efficiently than running distances at a long distance pace, even if you find the longer distances hard, they’re nowhere near as good as sprint training for fat loss.
If your feet and joints hurt, ten thousand metres (especially on roads) is doing that no good neither. Sprints sessions (especially on grass) will be much kinder to your joints as you won’t be putting your feet and joints under 30-40 minutes of continuous impact of a 10k.
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You're half right and here's why.
"If you’re running to lose fat you’re better of doing sprint sets rather than running distances."
Yes and no. Sprints are effective for burning fat but this is only really significant in the context of high-intensity interval training (HIIT). And even then, it won't have any significant effect on its own. So simply going out and doing some sprints won't necessarily have much impact. When you perform a HIIT session, you alternate between sprints and recoveries. When the sprints reach (typically) about 4 minutes, your body responds by essentially expecting this to keep happening so this is where the 'afterburn' effect comes in: your metabolism remains elevated for some hours afterwards so you continue to burn fat through increased heart rate etc.
Some reasons why it's not as effective as often claimed:
Firstly, if you're doing it right, you will only have about 4 repeats or so per session. And the impact that they have is that significant recovery is required from these sessions, meaning you can only do it in an effective manner once per week - at most (many do them fortnightly). This is where the science around HIIT is often misunderstood by those aiming to use it for fat loss. One weekly session - of any kind - isn't going to burn enough calories on its own to facilitate effective weight loss. Say you want to lose 3,500 kcals or so per week (roughly equivalent to 0.5kg weight loss), do you think you're gonna get even anywhere remotely near that from one session? No chance.
"You’ll shred the fat miles more efficiently than running distances at a long distance pace, even if you find the longer distances hard, they’re nowhere near as good as sprint training for fat loss."
The first part of this is correct. HIIT (not sprints but
specifically HIIT) IS indeed more efficient in terms of the time and distance involved. However, this is irrelevant because those times and distances are so small that it doesn't matter how efficient they are.
"If your feet and joints hurt, ten thousand metres (especially on roads) is doing that no good neither. Sprints sessions (especially on grass) will be much kinder to your joints as you won’t be putting your feet and joints under 30-40 minutes of continuous impact of a 10k."
I'm afraid that this appears to be a myth. I'm yet to see any good evidence that suggests road running to be bad for joints. I'm happy to read any that you might come across though.
