October for Interval Training
It’s time to take your cardio up a notch and do some intervals this October! (Intervaltober? HIITober? Well, never mind.) There are many ways to space, and not all of them need to feel like you’re dying, so let’s explore the possibilities.
The good thing about intervals, by the way, is that you can do them outdoors in the fresh autumn air (if you’re running or cycling), or hop on a cardio machine, or even do them in your living room if the world around you. your door is too cold or out of season hot. So to get you started, here’s a simple beginner’s guide:
HIIT is intense, but not the only option
The classic high-intensity interval training (HIIT) formula is Tabata: 20 seconds of complex exercise followed by 10 seconds of rest. It’s so tedious that you can only do it for a few minutes at a time.
On paper, HIIT has many benefits as it burns a lot of calories in a short amount of time and challenges your cardiorespiratory system. These are wonderful things! However, there are two problems:
- Most people don’t do them hard enough.
- If you do them very hard, you will be exhausted for the rest of the day and will lie like a slug on the couch.
If you love HIIT, go for it! If not, there are other types of spacing you might like more.
3-5 minute intervals are great for building endurance
If you can maintain a tight pace for three to five minutes, this is the perfect place to improve your VO2max, which is measured by cardio fitness.
But, as we wrote earlier , it’s hard to figure out how to force yourself to strain hard enough to get the benefits of such a long interval without straining too much. The sweet spot is hard for one minute and then easy for one minute.
30-20-10 is my personal favorite
This is a lesser known interval, but this is what I love when I return to running after a break. I use a real wristwatch for this (just start the stopwatch when you start), but you can program an interval timer as well.
To do 30-20-10, you walk (or jog slowly) for 30 seconds. When the stopwatch shows 30 seconds, increase your pace. And when he gets 50, start the sprint. Repeat for five minutes or so (the minutes field on the stopwatch shows how many cycles you’ve done), then walk for a minute and start over. I find sprint challenging, but the walking / running part allows me to catch my breath, just enough so that I don’t feel miserable.
Do you have a favorite spacing formula? And what is your favorite way of doing it – running, rowing, jumping? Let us know and we’ll be back in the coming weeks with some more ideas.