Advice On Getting In Shape In Four Minutes!
posted on 09/18/2009
It's a familiar excuse for many of us- I just don't have enough TIME to work out. Of course we would work out, but we only have a few spare minutes and surely that isn't enough time to do anything, so why bother?
Well you can go ahead and throw that excuse out the window. The below workout, known as the Tabata Protocol, was designed to be one of the best conditioning protocols on the planet (it was created and tested for Olympic athletes) and takes only 4 minutes to complete. How hard can 4 minutes be? More importantly how fit can you really get with just 4 minutes of exercise? The answer to both is VERY.
To do the workout, you need to select a single exercise, preferably one that uses large muscle groups that will not fatigue too easily (the squat is a good choice or a front squat if you want to add resistance). This can also be done on an exercise bike as it was in the original study.
Once you have your exercise selected, the workout works as follows:
20 sec. of work
10 sec. of rest
Repeat 8 times for a total of four minutes.
The point is to do as many reps as possible (or sprint as hard as you can on the bike if you chose that option) during the work portion. It is very important that you really go all out during the work parts to get the full benefit. Once you have done 8 sets, you are done. In the original study the Olympic athletes this was tested on apparently nearly passed out in the floor. You should also be feeling a little wiped out (if you are not you either didn't work hard enough or chose an exercise that did not allow you to work hard enough). It should also be noted that those same Olympic athletes improved both their aerobic AND anaerobic capacities far more than aerobic training alone did (which didn't improve the anaerobic conditioning at all). It is arguably the most complete workout on the planet.
If you want to track your progress and improve each time, you should keep track of the number of repetitions you complete for each work set. At the completion of the four minutes, you judge your 'score' by what the fewest number of reps you were able to complete on any work set. For example, if you did 10, 10, 10, 10, 4, 10, 10, 10 on your exercise, your score would actually be a 4 since that was the fewest reps you were able to complete. Next workout shoot for 5, etc.
So the next time you think you don't have enough time to workout, remember that it only takes 4 minutes a day to get in incredible shape. Whether you have the will power or not to do it is another question, but don't every let time be an excuse for being out of shape. Where there is a will, there is a way.
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