5 Fat Burning, Fitness Building Intervals

If fat loss is your goal I’d highly suggest adding some interval cardio into your exercise diet for 28 days.

Intervals with running, bike riding, rowing, paddling a kayak or playing a sport like basketball, netball, martial arts, indoor soccer and surfing are all great fitness builders and fat burners.

If you can play a sport, go do that. It makes doing your interval training easy.

If you want to build fitness at home or for running and riding, here’s some workouts you can try.

Do a maximum of 2 x 20 minute sessions a week for the 28 days and reassess your energy levels after that.

Repeats #1

5 sets of 3 minutes with 3 minutes rest between intervals.

Go as fast as you can for 3 minutes and rest at a complete stop doing some stretches and sucking in lungful’s of air.

Repeats #2

12 sets of 1 minute with 30 seconds between intervals.

Aim to stay consistent with your speed and distance travelled to track your progress.

2 Sets

2 sets of 5 minutes with 2 minutes recovery.

Then 5 sets of 1 minute with 30 seconds recovery.

Again, stay consistent with your speed and distance.

Ladders

You’ll go for 90 seconds with 1 minute rest.

Then you repeat the 90 seconds with only 45 seconds rest.

Then 90 on 30 off, 90 on 15 off, 90 on 30 off and 90 on 45 off and finish with another 90 seconds.

Above workouts are from Power, Speed, Endurance by Brian Mackenzie.

1 Mile Run Time Trial

You’ll either need to measure out the distance by car, on a track or use the Runkeeper app like I did.

Go as fast as you can for the 1 mile or 1.6km and record your time.

Workout complete.

This is one of the simplest and most brutal fitness tests I’ve done recently and I really like it.

If you’re over 9 minutes you’ve got some work to do.

If you’re between 7 and 9 minutes you’re intermediate.

If it’s 5-7 minutes you’re advanced.

And if you’re sub 5 minutes, you are an elite beast.

I scored 8:15 around a month ago and it took close to half an hour to recover from it.

You can choose to go as fast or as leisurely as you like first time. I choose fast.

Variations

You can do intervals up hills, on the road, on a treadmill or rowing machine, on grass or soft sand or whatever you please.

Last week I was doing sled drags up my driveway for 40 seconds, hauling a tyre behind me.

I highly recommend the free Runkeeper app which turns your phone into a GPS tracker. This way you can track distance and time easily and even record your past workouts.