Mix it Up with Interval Training and Get Lean

Everyone can vouch for me when I say that every so often there comes a day when we just can’t muster up the motivation to hop on the treadmill or the bike and do our typical cardio routine.  In all areas of training monotony has the potential to put the brakes on your gains, not to mention your zest for working out.

One way to avoid this veritable training death trap is to look for new ways to challenge yourself in general and your respiratory system in particular.  There are definitely a ton of methods to employ when training the cardio respiratory system whether your goal is fat loss, increasing your lactic acid threshold, or heart health.

Certainly one of the most effective and simple of these methods is interval training.  What interval training involves is blending both high intensity training with lower intensity effort, in one synergistic routine.  The idea is to mix short highly intense periods of effort with less intense active recovery exercise.  In doing so what you are essentially doing is targeting both the aerobic and anaerobic systems.  All of this can be done in the same time it would take you to trudge through one of your typical, albeit less effective routines.

In going about this type of training, begin as you normally would with a five minute warm up at a light pace gradually increasing your heart rate.  The best way to measure this would be to simply take your pulse manually for fifteen seconds or to use a heart rate monitor, which is often built in to many of the newer cardio machines.  Right after you feel adequately warmed up, you can transition straight into a period of increased effort.  If you were using a treadmill for instance, you would begin to jog or perhaps sprint, depending on your level of conditioning.  You should be going at a pace that would be hard to maintain for more than a brief period.  The muscles, when engaged in this type of intensity will begin to fill up with and then eliminate lactic acid, the toxicity of which is responsible for that telltale “burn” you feel within the body.  This nasty chemical compound eventually makes it hard for the muscles to contract.  It is at this point that the intensity level needs to be adjusted.

When you feel this fatigue within the muscles occurring you should decrease the intensity level to something that should feel much easier then the previous level and can be maintained for longer.  The idea is to maintain you pulse at a lower rate, one that will still provide for aerobic work.  This zone is referred to as the “active rest period”.  The body is able to recover as the muscles are replenished with oxygen-rich nutrients and the exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen is improved.  At this point the burning effects of lactic acid should diminish.  This is the latter half of one cycle.

This process should be repeated over several times for the remainder of the thirty-minute routine.  More time can be added, but this is up to you.  The main idea is to maintain alternating between opposing periods of low and high intensity.  The high intensity periods should always be shorter than the active rest periods.  As your level of conditioning increases you can increase the amount of time trained in the high intensity zone and decrease the amount of time trained in the active rest zone.  What can also be adjusted is the effort exerted during the high intensity period while maintaining the time training in that zone.  Doing so increases the range between your higher intensity periods and your active rest periods and allows your focus to remain on one factor at a time.

Experimenting with different focal points can be helpful as long as you ease yourself into increased effort.  Doing so will allow you to get a great workout that is quick, easy, and far from monotonous.  With a little consistency it should assist you in smashing through whatever plateaus you might be faced with as well.

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