Interval training - it's been a buzz word for a while now it seems.
And there are a good reasons for that, whether you want to burn fat, gain muscle or improve your stamina interval training works great.
What makes it so good? We'll get there, but first a quick over view of what interval training is: as the name suggests it's a work out routine where you do exercise in intervals, usually very short (from 20 seconds to about 3 minutes depending on work out) followed by a quick break, then exercise, then break.
There are several reasons why this method is very effective.
Firstly it allows you to go at or near maximum effort - something that isn't possible with a flat work out with no breaks, the rest periods in between allow you to keep going at that maximum level for longer amounts of time.
Why is doing exercise at maximum effort matters? Well, just think about two athletes running a 100 meters.
One is a sprinter that runs it at a sub 10 seconds, the other is a long distance marathoner who runs it at high but sustainable pace of 6 meters per second.
The sprinter can only run 100meters at that speed, marathoner can run for hours.
Which one do you think will burn more calories and have a more effective workout? Of course the sprinter.
Interval training allows you to do exercise at maximum effort which produces much better results than exercising at 70% or some such level of your maximum in the same period of time.
Time is the second part that makes interval training so great.
At some point you reach a level where your fitness is so good that doing exercise in aerobic regime (sustainable level) hardly produces any results unless you do it for hours.
But doing them at maximum level with short breaks in between allows you to get a great work out in a short period of time.