Interval Training? How?

You need to get in some cardio training. You DON’T need to spend all day doing it. Lots of you have a treadmill, bike or other piece of cardio equipment at home. Your best bet for increasing your fat loss efforts is to do intervals rather than a long, slow session where you barely break a sweat and are bored silly. Below I explain three different training protocols depending on your fitness level. These can be applied to any cardio equipment or can even be applied to a run/walk scenario.

For each of these protocols you will do a fairly easy warm up and cool down. You will repeat the hard set/active recovery 5-8 times depending on how much time you have to devote to your workout. (Active recovery is when you are still working, but at a low intensity in order to lower your heart rate.)

One of the biggest mistakes people make with HIIT, is that they don’t go hard enough on their hard set or easy enough on the active recovery set. You should really push and then really pull back in effort.

Beginner: Warm up 3-5 minutes, hard set for 30 seconds, active recovery 1 min, cool down 3-5 minutes

Intermediate: Warm up 3-5 minutes, hard set for 30 seconds, active recovery 30 seconds, cool down 3-5 minutes

Advanced: Warm up 3-5 minutes, hard set for 1 minute, active recovery 30 seconds, cool down 3-5 minutes

You will see that as you get more fit, you will slowly be increasing your work load and decreasing your active recovery or rest time. These are just a few of many intervals that you could employ to increase your fitness level and fat burning efforts.