LISSLow-intensity steady-state

LISS, low intensity steady state, is continuous exercise at an easy, sustainable effort: brisk walking, easy cycling, gentle rowing, typically for thirty to sixty minutes or more. It became a labelled category largely as a counterpart to HIIT in fitness marketing.

Its merits are real and unglamorous. It burns energy with almost no recovery cost, it can be done frequently and by almost anyone, it is easy to sustain as a habit, and it stacks alongside hard training without competing for the same recovery.

For fat loss it works through the ledger like everything else. The old fat burning zone reasoning, that low intensities use a higher proportion of fat and therefore remove more of it, confuses proportion with total, and comparisons at matched energy expenditure find no meaningful advantage.

Its underrated role is in the space between exercise and daily movement. An hour of easy walking is largely NEAT with a label on, and defending daily movement is one of the more effective things you can do during a diet, since spontaneous activity tends to fall as calories drop.

For aerobic fitness it builds the base, particularly for people starting from little, though it develops the top end of VO2max less than interval work does. A programme with only LISS eventually plateaus.

It is also the appropriate intensity when recovering, when returning from illness or injury, and when training load elsewhere is already high.

In practice, treat daily steps as your LISS target and use our steps to calories calculator, rather than treating it as a separate discipline requiring a machine.