Interval Training For Beginners
There are many myths that are perpetuated in the world of health and fitness, and the biggest myth is that the best way to burn off fat is to jog at a steady pace for at least half an hour. The perceived wisdom is that the body doesn’t get into a fat burning mode until it has been exercising for at least half an hour, almost like it needs to warm itself up first. Well, the thing is, this is not true. If it were, no one would ever lose weight, because very few people actually exercise for periods longer than 30 minutes in one go.
Let’s take a look at some of the leanest sports people in the world, footballers. They don’t consistently run at a steady pace for at least 30 minutes during the course of a football match do they? No, they pretty much run around for periods of a 30 seconds or so at a time, then have rest, while they wait for the ball to come back into their area or for a free kick, throw in or corner.
So what can we summise from this? That maybe all footballers have freaky genetics that mean they just don’t put on weight. Hardly likely. You only have to look at players like Paul Merson, Paul Gascoine, Maradona and more recently Carlos Tevez to see that even when players are playing, they sometimes struggle with excess fat.
So if it’s not freaky genetics, why do all these professional footballers have such little body fat? It’s because to play football, they are effectively doing a 90 minute interval training session during a game. Sure, they will do some training during the week, which will no doubt involve some running, some weights and some skills work, but you can bet your life that more often than not, the fitness training will be interval training.
If you’re still not convinved that interval training is the best way of losing excess body fat, then how about this, an article in the Journal of Applied Physiology states that fat oxidation (scientific way of saying fat burning) is increased to levels above what an already fit athlete’s levels would be. So if you have the fitness levels to do interval training, and you want to seriously increase your fat burning, get out there and do a couple of interval sessions each week.
If you’ve never done any interval training, it’s worth just taking a look at what would be involved. To simplify things for beginners, the basics are this – exercise for a period of 15 minutes, during this period do thirty seconds of exercise at close to your maximum, then exercise for 2 and half minutes at a canter. Repeat this cycle four more times and you will have completed five full intervals.
So if you were on a treadmill, you might run at 14kmh as your top speed, then slow down to 9kmh for the recovery periods in between the faster, intense bursts of speed.
If you don’t have access to a treadmill, you can do this in a park or when out running on the roads and pavements near where you live.
If you’re running in a park, the best thing to do is find a stretch of ground that will take about thirty seconds to cover at a run, and then just keep going back and forwards on this. If you happen to have a football or rugby pitch nearby, the easiest way to do this is to run the width of the pitch, jog up the length of the pitch, then run across the other end. So in effect you run the short distance between the corners and across the back of the goal, then down the touchline to the other end and repeat.
If you go running nearby along the roads and pavements, an easy way to do intervals is to pick a stretch of road that has streetlamps, as they will be fairly evenly spaced out. Run between three lamps, then jog between six to nine lamps to get your breath back then repeat.
I will in the not too distant future be releasing a free e-book about interval training, in which I will explain the science of it, the benefits over and above normal fitness training, and various methods of doing interval training for different types of exercise, like running, cycling, swimming and rowing. If you would like to be sent a copy of this e-book when I have completed it, please contact me and I’ll add you to my list.
2 Responses to “Interval Training For Beginners”
April 18th, 2009 saat: 2:36 pm
Great stuff.
I think the key here is doing ANY type of intervals. I mean you have over a handful of different ‘types’ of interval training programs (fartlek, HIIT, Tabatat, etc). The key is doing SOME sort of intervals that involve maximum, if not sub-maximum effort coupled with periods of ‘rest’ or light effort. Doing this cycle a number of times together.
I think it’s safe to say anyone who has done both can attest that intervals tax your body in ways long-cardio never could. And the results support it.
Thanks for sharing.
April 19th, 2009 saat: 1:37 pm
I agree Sean, I often hear people say they are too unfit to do interval training and that they will “work up to doing it over the next few months”, it’s just a cop out really in my opinion. I agree they may not be fit enough to go at full tilt initially, but as you say, going sub-optimal will still see benefits for them, and it will certainly speed up their fitness gains versus just doing steady state cardio.
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