I had heard the same thing and did alot of reading and everything that I found that was from a reputable source all said that your heart rate needs to reach a certain point (for a certain amount of time) before it will start burning fat storages and that breaking up excersise into short spurts will not accomplish this....so it looks like it has to be a minimum of 20 min (plus 5 min warm up and 5 min cool down) is the bare minimum and even at that it is still recommended 45-60min of steady excersise that gets you into that burning zone. But if you aren't active at all then I would say anything is better than nothing...but for more consistant results the longer is the way to go....I wish it weren't
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