Festive Fitness!
Blog by Harry Hitchcock, Studio Zest P/T
‘Tis the season to take a break from work, relax with the family and indulge in festive food. The gyms are closed, the PT’s are having time off and it’s too cold to go out running - the perfect excuse to forget about our exercise regimes.
Plus, our yearly fitness goals don’t start till January 1st right? But, how about this year we switch things up?
Get a head start on your fitness goals in the comfort of your own home with a four minute TABATA workout!
What exactly is Tabata?
Tabata is a high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workout that incorporates brief, supramaximal, 20-second intervals into a four-minute exercise bout.
Is four minutes long enough?
Although just four minutes in duration, Tabata yields a notable improvement in aerobic fitness. If we take a look at studies dating back to 1994, it shows that a group of Tabata exercisers burned more calories and lost substantially more body fat than compared with a second group, who trained for longer durations doing steady-state, continuous, endurance exercise.
There are many other benefits to taking part in Tabata, such as: improving blood pressure, insulin sensitivity, glucose regulation.
How easy is it to do Tabata at home?
There are many different ways to perform Tabata home style workouts. If you've already got a spin bike or treadmill at home then put them to good use over Christmas and incorporate them into your routine.
Do you have some dumbbells or kettlebells? Use these too! Any fast paced, explosive lifting action such as dumbbell squats with overhead press will work well.
If you don’t have any equipment at home, don’t worry! Good old fashion body weight style exercises are as good as any. Squat jumps, high knees and star jumps are all great exercises to incorporate into your Tabata workout. And if you have other equipment you can mix them up with body weight exercises for a more fun dynamic work out.
All Tabata style workouts follow the same principle:
* 8 sets of 20 seconds exercises working at 100% intensity
* each 20 seconds is followed by 10 seconds of downtime to recover for the next 20 second bout.
So, get ahead of the game so that your January is off to a smooth start without that usual struggle to get into a routine.
If you have four minutes free, four times a week, then you’ll be well on the way to achieving those new year goals before January 1st.
Studio Zest’s Harry Hitchcock in a P/T session