You're busy. You're overextended. Work calls. Family calls louder. You want to exercise more, but you keep telling yourself, "I don't have time!" So goes the cycle of inactivity, stress eating, and maybe not just strength loss but weight gain.
But what if you could torch calories, build muscle and boost your cardiovascular fitness by working out for a mere 16 minutes? What if you could work out really hard for less time than it takes to hardboil a few eggs - yet look like you are a so-called "gym rat?"
It can be done. The solution even has a name: Tabata. The form of extreme High Intensity Interval Training is named after Izumi Tabata, a former sports fitness researcher in Japan, who proved with his athletes that less really can be more.
I was reminded how much more it can be this past weekend - at the SCW Fitness Conference in Atlanta. Fitness pro Mindy Mylrea led a High Intensity Interval Training class built around Tabata. It kicked my Badass to the curb. In 16 minutes, I burned 350 calories and worked my muscles to jelly-quiver failure. My quads burned, my heart pounded in my throat, my arms wanted to give out. The next morning, my core reminded me how hard we had worked. In a word: Awesome.
See, Tabata is the perfect solution to our time-pressed lives. It is a small time investment yielding huge results. Mylrea is 50 but has the body of a petite and perky 25-year-old pro football cheerleader. She says a few years ago, she was 11 pounds heavier in spite of her 22-classes-per-week teaching schedule.
"I was more unfit, but I was doing more fitness," she says. Fast forward to today, and she's leaner, stronger - but doing no more than 30 minutes for cardio workouts. Her not-so-secret: Tabata training.
The Tabata method consists of 4-minute circuits - each of them 20 seconds of work followed by 10 seconds of rest, repeated for eight rounds. The 20 seconds of work is balls to the wall, maximum intensity. The 10-second rest doesn't feel like it's long enough, and by the fourth round you might be uttering curse words you didn't even think you knew. But only 4 minutes later, it feels like your're halfway through a typical hourlong workout.
So try this little Tabata drill and see how it feels. Friday, as part of this upcoming series of blogs dedicated to "Time-Pressed Badasses," I'll post a full workout consisting of four circuits - for a total of 16 minutes.
Before you get started, note a few golden rules of Tabata:
1. No more than 20: If you can do it for more than 20 seconds, it's not true Tabata. You need to add an intensifier, be it more plyometrics or speed or resistance with dumbbells, medicine ball, etc.
2. Keep it simple: The best Tabata drills are not complicated. Just do 20 seconds of burpees, times eight, and see what it does to your muscles and heart rate. Simple but tough works best.
3. Rest up: Tabata demands recovery time. Don't try to do this on consecutive days.
4. Don't get into a lull: Change up the exercises and drills as soon as it starts to feel "comfortable" after a few weeks or several. Make your muscles scream, WTH is this ?!!
Tabata Tryout
The move: Jump Lunges
1. Check your "before" heart rate.
2. For 20 seconds, with the right leg out front in a lunge position, jump up and land back into the lunge, staying on the right side. Rest for 10 seconds, no more and no less.
3. For 20 seconds, do jump lunges on the left leg. Rest for 10 seconds.
4. Repeat four times, for a total of 8 rounds.
5. Check your heart rate now.
Now, e-mail me at [email protected] to let me know how you fared!
Bonus Homework, Part 1: What does the inside of your fridge look like? Send me a pic, for better or worse, and it will be posted as part of a collage on the blog - anonymous if you want!
Bonus Homework, Part 2: go to www.yourfitguru/shannon and join My Fit Crew. Blog feedback, fitness advice, class info, etc.
Coming up: The Full Tabata, and 3 healthy meals you can make in less than 15 minutes.