Cardio training conjures up images of constant jogging on a treadmill but there are far more effective ways to burn calories and improve your fitness. Not only will a varied workout help you to burn more calories in a shorter space of time, but it will also help to keep your exercise programme fun and interesting. There’s nothing more demotivating than a dull workout regime, so help yourself and your body by creating an interval training workout.
Instead of doing a low intensity workout for a long period of time, interval training works in the opposite way – you will perform high intensity exercises in short, sharp bursts to burn a lot of calories in a brief amount of time. Not only does this help you to burn calories more effectively, but it also helps to boost your metabolism. High intensity sessions are great for raising your metabolism and also for keeping it working long after you’ve finished exercising, making it more efficient overall.
Your cardiovascular health will benefit greatly from interval training. While long jogs on the treadmill may burn a lot of calories, they don’t get your heart rate up. In order to lose weight and improve your fitness, you need to elevate your heart rate, and interval training is a great way of doing that.
You need to combine three variables in your workout programme – exercise time, recovery and the number of repetitions. Two of the most popular sessions are ten reps of one minute running, followed by a minute’s recovery, then eight reps of two minutes running with a ninety seconds recovery stage in between each rep. Likewise, you can try pyramid training which is similar but the exercise times are not fixed – instead, you increase the time towards the middle of the workout and decrease as you reach the end. Whichever way you decide to exercise, opting for interval training regimes can be a really effective way of improving your fitness.
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