Work Smarter, Not Harder with Interval Workouts

Let me tell you why I’m not the biggest fan of long, slow cardio exercise and time-consuming workouts in the gym.

For one thing, I think most people waste far too much time in the gym. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to be doing other things. Like playing tennis or writing books on energy. And I think a lot of what passes for “workouts” is actually pretty mindless activity that looks, frankly, kind of joyless to me. I see people on the treadmills at the gym running like rats, iPods in ears, staring at the TV monitors, and not looking all that happy.

Less time, more results
I’ve been touting the benefits of shorter, more concentrated training for a long time. Coming from the gym culture, I’ve seen routines that too less than 12 minutes to perform that would leave the average steelworker collapsed in a puddle of his own sweat.

I’m not saying you should give up enjoyable long distance stuff such as hiking, biking, walking, or running, but I am saying that a lot of what passes for workouts is a waste of time. You can accomplish more with full-body circuit training and high-intensity interval training. That’s what I do for energy and for exercise, and it’s what I recommend.

The most efficient way to increase cardiovascular strength, brain health, and energy, is through interval training. There are different ways of doing interval training, but all include high-intensity bursts of exercise followed by lower intensity exercise (or in some cases rest). High intensity generally refers to training between 70 and 85 percent of your maximum heart rate. (To calculate your maximum heart rate, subtract your age from 220). Interval training is an especially effective method for burning fat and increasing VO¬2 (aka oxygen uptake, which measures lung capacity and thus cardiovascular fitness).

Alternate your days of interval training with a longer, more steady state exercise that you enjoy, such as cycling or hiking. After just 10 minutes of interval training, you should have enough energy to blast through any day.

Putting Your Mind to the Muscle
I think exercise – like everything else-should have a quality of mindfulness to it.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his pre-Terminator, pre-Governator days, was fond of saying, “Put your mind into the muscle”. Schwarzenegger claimed that it improved his results if he visualized his shoulders growing to the size of grapefruits while doing shoulder presses. In his mind’s eye, he could actually ‘see” his deltoids expanding while he hoisted the weights.

Old-time bodybuilding gurus such as Vince Gironda (who was the owner of the legendary Vince’s Gym in Southern California) didn’t even allow music to be played in his facility, claiming it was too distracting. “You’re here to lift, not to listen to music,” he’d says.

Maybe you don’t want to go that far, and you probably don’t care about your deltoids looking like grapefruits, but there’s looking like grapefruits, but there’s more than a kernel of truth in the weight training philosophy of both Schwarzenegger and Gironda. Moral of the story: don’t multitask when you work out. Use it as a laboratory for practicing mindfulness and concentration. You’ll get a lot more out of it, and you’ll be able to accomplish much more in a lot less time.