How to ramp up the speed for better fat loss and fitness gains
If you want to run faster, then you need to start running faster. This may sound as a cliché but because it’s true.
Speedwork—in all its forms—is key for unlocking your full potential as a runner. Not only that, speedwork will make you fitter, enhance the range of movement in your joints, boost power and drive in your lower body, and it will eventually help you to run harder for longer.
Furthermore, Speedwork is key for weight loss. According to many studies, interval running—a form of speed work— burns up to three times more calories than sticking to a steady and easy pace. Of course, long runs at a low intensity have their benefits, but when it comes to burning the flab, speedwork wins the race.
For many of us the hardest part about working out is motivation. This could be due to the fact that you haven’t made fitness a priority; when you’ve always got something more important on your plate it’s all too easy to put your health on the back burner.
Or maybe you’ve been exercising diligently and you’re simply not seeing the results you want, a situation that can be frustrating and discouraging.
It could even be that you simply don’t find your exercise routine particularly challenging or fun.
Whatever your reasons for skipping the workout day after day, the truth is that you need to find ways to get motivated, and interval training can provide you with several benefits that might just move you to get your butt off the couch and into gear.
Here are a few benefits of interval training to consider: (more…)
How to Effectively Combine HIIT Sessions with Endurance Cardio
Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please: walking or jogging for hours on the treadmill, peddling for hours on the stationary bike, climbing a mountain on the StairMaster, and plodding away on the elliptical trainer is NOT the best way to burn calories!
We’ve seen a hundred studies telling us that high intensity interval training (HIIT) burns more calories and fat, speeds up your metabolism, and is less catabolic than hours of endurance cardio. HIIT can also be far less boring, will actually help you build more muscle tissue, and increases your resting metabolic rate.
HIIT: Twenty minutes of HIIT cardio improves your VO2 max, burns a ton of calories, increases your metabolism, and maintains or builds muscle tissue all at once.
vs.
Endurance Cardio: Sixty minutes of endurance cardio is not only boring as hell, it also increases cortisol, burns muscle tissue (protein) for energy, and halts protein synthesis. (more…)
Should Bodybuilders Do Cardio After Weight Training?
Spend some time in a corporate gym and you will see hundreds of bodybuilders lifting moderately heavy weight for sets of 10-15 reps, then you’ll see them hop on a StairMaster or elliptical machine for about 20-30 minutes of moderate intensity endurance cardio. There are many reasons for this behavior, the most common being that weight training is just a hell of a lot more fun than cardio.
Apparently the weights-first-cardio-second protocol is considered the most effective way for bodybuilders to build muscle and lose fat at the same time. But is it? (more…)
Wall Balls is a silly name for an exercise, I know, but that’s what you get when you borrow exercises from Crossfit. In fact, Wall Balls are a great conditioning exercise that builds full body stamina and endurance. It will also make you sweat.
This is an exercise that integrates perfectly into a high intensity interval training (HIRT) circuit, and can also be used to build high intensity interval training (HIIT) sessions, but do not translate that well into Tabata training.
Wall Balls also can be used separately as a full body conditioning exercise by attempting to complete X reps as fast as possible, or by attempting to complete as many reps as possible in a set time limit. Either way, it burns!
Medicine Ball Training
Medicine ball training has been around for a long time, and in fact they were used frequently at gyms back in the 18th and 19th centuries. Ancient (3000+ years ago) wrestlers and other athletes used to train with various sand-filled implements, which evolved over time into the medicine ball.
The standard medicine ball is a weighted rubber ball measuring roughly 14 inches in diameter, although sizes vary greatly nowadays as you can get a medicine ball from the size of your fist to the size of your body.
Used in a wide variety of fitness programs, medicine balls can be benched, rowed, curled, pressed, squatted, tossed, caught, bounced, squished, and generally manhandled all for the sake of fitness.
Now you can download the Full Body Plus HIIT for Fat Loss workout routines in Excel spreadsheet format. You can use these files to print out the routine and take it to the gym on a clipboard, keep track of your progress on the computer, or both.
The Full Body Plus HIIT Fat Loss Routine for Men can be found here:
I made some changes to the programs as well. Going through them I realized that there will almost always be time to complete those optional sets at the end of the routine, so I made the “e” exercises mandatory and added an additional abdominal exercise to make a super-set.
Originally posted: 1/27/10 Updates: 2/1/10 updated routine, added Excel spreadsheet workout logs) 3/8/10 added example HIIT routines for days 2, 4, and 6.
We are integrating 3 full body training sessions with 3 HIIT routines and taking the 7th day off. Since the goal is fat loss, we are striving to add some muscle mass, maintain strength, and burn as many calories as possible.
This is accomplished by staying in a slightly higher rep range than we would normally use for strictly strength training, while using super-sets for most of our exercises. We add an optional set to the end of each workout in case you are able to finish the workout early.
Major compound exercises are rotated to prioritize a different muscle group on each of the 3 training sessions each week.
Originally posted: 1/26/10 Updates: 2/1/10 updated routine, added Excel spreadsheet workout logs) 3/8/10 added example HIIT routines for days 2, 4, and 6.
We are integrating 3 full body training sessions with 3 HIIT routines and taking the 7th day off. Since the goal is fat loss, we are striving to add some muscle mass, maintain strength, and burn as many calories as possible.
This is accomplished by staying in a slightly higher rep range than we would normally use for strictly strength training, while using super-sets for most of our exercises. We add an optional set to the end of each workout in case you are able to finish the workout early.
Major compound exercises are rotated to prioritize a different muscle group on each of the 3 training sessions each week.
This guest article was written by Adrienne Carlson, who regularly writes on the topic of pharmacy technician certification. Adrienne welcomes your comments and questions at her email address: [email protected]
I enjoyed going for a jog early each morning, for about a month or so that is.
When it started to become boring and monotonous, I discovered interval training. So I varied my routine to sprint and then jog for 300 meters and 100 meters respectively.
It kept me going for a while, but then, I began to lag and find excuses not to go.
There’s no doubt that it’s one of the best ways to lose weight and improve fitness, but if you want to stay the course with interval training, you must find ways to make it more interesting.
And to that end, here’s what I did (and what you can do too) to make interval training more interesting and more effective:
High Intensity Interval Training, often represented by the acronym HIIT, is really a big deal. HIIT training is the ideal and most effective replacement for underachieving endurance cardio.
As a matter of fact, in studies HIIT is 9x more effective at burning fat than endurance cardio.
More often than not, I have talked about HIIT workouts made up only of interval sprints. Today I would like to discuss HIIT training with resistance machines, but not to be confused with High Intensity Resistance Training, or HIRT, which I will write about shortly.
HIIT training will give you the following benefits:
Burn more calories than endurance cardio
Burn more fat than endurance cardio
Increase power
Increase speed
Increase muscle density
Improve anaerobic endurance
Improve aerobic endurance
Speed up metabolism for more than a day and a half
