20 x 3: Eliminating your belly fat in an hour a week

Think slogging it out at the gym five days a week will help you shed unwanted tummy fat? Think again. A 12-year study conducted by Dr Steve Boutcher at the University of New South Wales has proven that just 1 hour of interval sprinting a week achieves better results than five hours of intense aerobic exercise a week.

The trick is to exercise smarter not harder, and with 20 x 3, it’s all about the technique. The 20 x 3 plan for optimum fat burning involves repeated sprinting at near all-out intensity for 8 seconds followed by low intensity exercising for 12 seconds, for a period of 20 minutes. You can sprint using a skipping rope, a rowing machine, or even boxing, but the best place to start for beginners is the humble exercise bike. It’s easy to keep time and you can adjust the resistance of the bike to suit your fitness level.

Swingland: Between the Sheets of the Secretive, Sometimes Messy, but Always Adventurous Swinging Lifestyle

We pull back the curtain of the fascinating and often misunderstood subculture of the swinging lifestyle, and chat to Daniel Stern, author of Swingland.

How did you get into the swinging lifestyle, and what attracted you to it in the first place?

I didn't seek out the lifestyle only because I didn't know it existed. By my late-20s, all I knew was I sucked at sex and desperately wanted to improve. All the sex I'd had took place in committed relationships and, I'd found, the emotional entanglements of relationships were distracting me from sexual improvement, which, in turn, precluded me from completely engaging in a relationship. It was a vicious circle that wasn't going to resolve on its own. So, I dedicated myself to sexual batting practice. After months of flat-out rejection from internet searches for casual sex, I started getting nibbles and, eventually, worked my way into NSA (No Strings Attached) sex. Not long after, I learned of “the Lifestyle” and was off and running.