High Intensity Hill Sprint Interval Training Session
This evening, I thought I would practice what I preach, and because I’m writing a FREE e-book all about interval training, try out some of the sprint interval training that I’ve been researching. The basic theory is that the greater the intensity with which you work at during your fast intervals, the greater will be your fitness gains and your body-fat loss.
In fact, according to one paper I’ve read (Impact of exercise intensity on body fatness and skeletal muscle metabolism by Tremblay A, Simoneau JA, Bouchard C), the fat loss (adjusted for the amount of energy used during the periods of exercise) was nine times greater than compared to a regular, steady state, endurance training regime over a similar time frame.
I’ve always been a big fan of interval training, but I must confess that my interval training has mostly been at a medium intensity. So with this in mind, I decided I was going to go out and do fifteen to twenty minutes of sprint interval training. What’s more, I was going to do my sprinting up a hill!
The way to do sprint interval training is to run at full speed for 15-20 seconds, then to run at a job until your heart rate has recovered to 120-130 BPM, then repeat.
I went for a run down the lines along the Somerset levels near where I live, using the first few minutes as a warmup, before heading down a small hill. Once I got to the bottom of the hill, I turned around then sprinted until I was up the hill again - actually, I didn’t quite make it to the top, but I got to the part where the grradient dropped off from being steep to being gentle. I then jogged for about two hundred yards, turned around and repeated this. After doing this a second time, I was feeling overcome with dread at the prospect of doing this again, so instead opted for a slightly easier third interval and did the third interval over a flat stretch of about 80 yards, before jogging round a field and back to my house.
The whole session lasted about twenty minutes, including the jog out and the jog back, but the real hard part of the session probably only lasted for a minute or so! But that’s the beauty of it, the high intensity of the exercise stimulates the body’s fat burning hormones, and increases the transfer of lipids to in the blood stream (from what I can gather, lipids are fat burning enzymes which get to work on subcutaneous fat, and start turning it into energy that the muscles can use).
I enjoyed the session, and will definitely do it again, but next time I do it, I am going to use a heart rate monitor, so that I can ensure my heart rate is back down to 130 bpm before going again, and I’ll also do it on the flat!
3 Responses to “High Intensity Hill Sprint Interval Training Session”
May 6th, 2009 saat: 2:55 am
[...] the success of my firstsprint hill interval training session on Tuesday evening, I decided to go for another session today. My aim was to do about twenty [...]
May 6th, 2009 saat: 8:43 am
[...] PERSONAL FITNESS EXPERIENCES Batting leadoff, a la Rickey Henderson, we have Tristan from Body And Fitness Blog, who has authored more than a few quality articles on fitness, including his own training journal for anyone who wants to read about the daily challenges of an intense program. In this case, Tristan writes about a High Intensity Hill Sprint Interval Training Session. [...]
May 6th, 2009 saat: 5:47 pm
[...] Batting leadoff, a la Rickey Henderson, we have Tristan from Body And Fitness Blog, who has authored more than a few quality articles on fitness, including his own training journal for anyone who wants to read about the daily challenges of an intense program. In this case, Tristan writes about a High Intensity Hill Sprint Interval Training Session. [...]
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