December 4, 2018
Intervals are hands down, one of the best ways to increase the rate that your body burns fat. If you’re trying to drop weight, but you don’t like the idea of spending hours and hours in the gym, you need to learn to utilize treadmill interval workouts.
Far too often, people who are trying to lose or maintain weight will padlock themselves to a treadmill with a good book or gossip magazine and just spend an hour or two lugging away, tenaciously watching the calorie ticker go up and up. But, they really aren’t paying much attention at all to their “workout”, and it can make the time they do spend at the gym relatively futile.
Treadmill interval workouts force you to be aware of your body and your exertion level, and if it’s not high enough, you can quickly adjust it- instead of wasting time at the gym, spending an hour and a half unenthusiastically putting one foot in front of the other.
Warm up:
Walk at a comfortable pace at zero incline for 5 minutes.
Walking Interval:
Increase your intensity a little from your warm-up; you may also want to add a bit of an incline into the mix. Everyone’s exact MPH will be different, but you should be walking fast enough that holding up a conversation would be moderately difficult. Hold this pace for 2 minutes.
Running interval:
As soon as you’ve finished your 2 minute walking period, dive straight into a minute long running interval. Again, the exact pace is going to depend on many different variables; however, you should be working hard enough that you would rate your exertion at 8 or 9 out of ten. You should not be able to hold up a conversation during this period and reading a magazine should be nearly impossible.
Repeat, alternating intervals for ten repetitions for a total of a 35 minutes routine
As soon as you finish either interval, go straight into the next one. Repeating this pattern 10 times makes for a 30 minutes plan, 35 including your warm up. Be sure to do a 5 minutes cooldown and stretch thoroughly when you’re finished.
This burns about 320 calories (exact figures will depend on your weight, fitness level, muscle content, etc) and increases your metabolism. Do this 3-4 day of the week for your cardio workout; you can also easily couple this routine with a strength training component.
