Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably familiar with the fact that interval training is as good as, if not better than, long steady state exercise for improving cardiovascular ability.  In other words, short bursts of high intensity exercise (often called sprints) are better than endless hours of monotony on a treadmill for improving performance.  That’s good news for those of us who absolutely HATE mind numbing long duration cardio.

However, what also soon became clear in the fitness industry is that interval training is equally good for fat loss too!  The day I figured that out I felt like a won the lottery.  I took my family and friends out for dinner, bought myself a Ferrari, took my wife to Tiffanys and told her to pick out the biggest rock they had in the place.  Okay, I’m exaggerating a little bit.  Only the part about the Ferrari is true…but I digress.

The point is that if you’re doing long boring steady state cardio for fat loss you need to stop now.  The metabolic changes produced by sprint training are the same so you can stop wasting your time. 

And here’s another bonus…distance runners (or those people who are trying to be distance runners in hopes of losing body fat) are often plagued with injuries.  Some of the common complaints include plantar fasciitis, hamstring pulls, knee pain, and IT band problems just to name a few.  The sad part is that many of these things are highly related to overuse and they could be totally avoided or at least minimized if the person just did interval training instead.  Since the bouts of work are so short, the risk of overuse is low which makes this an even better reason to switch.

What exactly is an interval?

In most of the studies that have been done so far, the intervals used were 30 seconds of high intensity cycling against a very high resistance (otherwise known as a Wingate).  If you’ve never had the “pleasure” of performing a Wingate I should warn you that vomiting is common, nausea is a norm.  And since most of the subjects are usually untrained to begin with, you’d think that a bucket should be mandatory when performing this type of cardio.  Fortunately, most studies allow the subjects to rest for 4 minutes between bouts, but they do have to perform up to 7 of them.

The good news is that over the course of a couple weeks the interval training subjects become used to the training and they recover faster.  While the endurance training subjects in the study would come in every day for an hour and ride the stationary bike, the interval training subjects would be in and out in 30 minutes and the ended up getting exactly the same results.  What is even more impressive is that the interval training subjects only actually did a total of 3.5 minutes of work the whole time they were there.  The rest of the time they were just sitting around chatting.

So how do I actually do this stuff myself?

Herein lies the problem.  Everyone knows that interval training is great for fat loss (if you didn’t before you do now), but nobody actually knows how to do it so I’m going to give you a step by step guide on how to introduce interval training.

Step 1 – General Conditioning

Start by following a general cardiovascular conditioning phase for 2-3 weeks…especially if you’re not currently very conditioned (i.e., you’ve never been on a treadmill, but think you might have seen one in that area of the gym where all the cardio bunnies hang out).  At least twice per week hop on a stationary bike or a stair climber (notice that I didn’t say treadmill or elliptical you sissy) and hammer out a solid 30 minutes of sweat inducing cardio.  If you’re on the stair climber try not to use the hand rails.

I know this doesn’t really sound all that scientific and it really isn’t.  This is just to prevent you from tossing your cookies in front of the aforementioned ladies when you start your sprint training.  Trust me.  I’m doing you a favor.  I’ve seen far too many people try to leap right into sprint training and end up hating it so much because of the nausea that they never try it again.  Just take a couple weeks and get yourself some baseline conditioning.  You’ll appreciate it later.

And no, you’re not going to lose muscle mass, yada, yada, yada.  Don’t be an idiot.  If you haven’t been doing cardio to this point you could probably use it.

Tune in tomorrow and I’ll be laying out a complete introductory sprint program to help you shed fat and blow your cardiovascular conditioning through the roof!