The Benefits of Interval Training

If you’re someone who regularly gets their butt in a gym, then big kudos. You’re doing better than most people, and actively taking your health and wellness into your own hands. But there’s a big difference between an intense workout session, resulting in sore muscles, a sweat-drenched shirt, and panting breath, and a lazy few sets completed between lengthy social media perusing on your smartphone. And, unfortunately, a lot of people are guilty of doing more of the latter than the former. Whether it’s from a lack of time or a lack of motivation, or even just the sense that the workout routine has grown stale and boring, many guys out there are just going through the motions in the gym, rather than really pushing their bodies to new heights. Thankfully, there is an easy fix, albeit one you may not like at first: interval training. RELATED: The Benefits of Push-Ups Read on to learn what interval training is, how and why it works, and what it can do for your workouts. What Is Interval Training? The concept behind interval training is very simple: you train hard for short bursts of time, with minimal or even no rest between sets. An easy example: hop on a treadmill and sprint for 30 seconds, full out, and then jog for a minute before completing another 30-second sprint. In this case, your “rest” is the light jog. Interval training doesn’t just work with cardio, though. Another popular variation is to use antagonistic muscle groups to your advantage, training them one after the other. For example, you complete a set of bench press reps (chest muscles) and then immediately go into a set of bent-over rows (back muscles), without rest. While you’re training your back, your chest is resting, and while you’re training your chest, your back is resting — talk about efficiency! You can even take things up a notch by combining complementary exercises in rapid succession, to exhaust your muscles and build up muscular endurance. If this is your goal, instead of following up a bench press set with rows, you’ll do push-ups instead, further taxing your chest muscles to squeeze every last bit of hypertrophic potential out of the muscles. How Can Interval Training Benefit Me? If giving up your beloved rest time (read: quick phone checks between sets) seems unappealing, know that at least there are some serious benefits to shortening or eliminating your breaks and putting the pedal to the metal, so to speak. Less Time, Faster Results The first and most obvious benefit is in the time you’ll save when you start incorporating interval training. Don’t believe us? Spend some time surveying the people in a commercial gym at any given moment and you’ll see a lot of casual chitchatting, texting, scrolling and aimless walking, with the odd working set thrown in for good measure. In fact, we bet if you audit your own time in the same way, you’ll discover you’re way less productive than you probably thought. The fastest way to cut out the fat (literally and figuratively) is to begin interval training. Workouts that used to take you an hour can take as little as 30 minutes, once you start using super sets or shortened rest periods. If your gym isn’t busy, or you train at home, you can even combine weight training and cardio, taking care of your conditioning with jumping jacks, burpees, box jumps or a skipping rope. Accelerated Fat Loss Another huge benefit of interval training is accelerated fat loss. It shouldn’t be too controversial, either: if you up your workout intensity, you necessarily increase the calorie burn, making it easier to achieve a deficit and induce fat loss. But interval training does more than just burn more calories in less time. In a major study conducted by Nature on the effects of interval training on body composition, researchers were surprised to find that after eight weeks of regular exercise, the overall reduction in bodyweight was only “moderate.” When they dug deeper into the results, though, the conclusion was unambiguous: “a significant reduction in body fat content was observed among participants.” The only reason the total weight loss wasn’t greater was because of a “concurrent increase in muscle mass,” which is just a fancy way of saying that the participants not only lost fat but also gained muscle. Sounds pretty good, right? Efficient! Improved Cardiovascular Performance Your cardiovascular system encompasses both your heart and your lungs, and weight training alone rarely manages to tax both enough to induce improvements in overall cardiovascular health. Introduce interval training, though, and all of a sudden you have a potent recipe for better overall health. In a major metanalysis conducted for the National Library of Medicine, researchers found that improved aerobic and anaerobic conditioning was the most consistent benefit of regular interval training. We also love this method because it’s easy to get creative with it. If you like to run, you can hop on a treadmill between sets, but if you hate running, you can hit the bike or rowing machine, or just do intense conditioning exercises like jumping rope or burpees. Better Muscle Endurance Strength isn’t just a matter of maximum force output, especially when you try to apply your strength training to real-life situations, such as grappling in wrestling, lead blocking in football, or hanging from difficult holds in rock climbing. The other important and often-neglected variable is muscular endurance, which is best trained either using much higher rep schemes than most people are comfortable with or by drastically reducing the rest time between sets. Remember that aforementioned metanalysis? Well, the second biggest finding of their investigation was that interval training was consistently associated with dramatic gains in muscular endurance. This should come as no surprise, since the protocols of interval training basically involve taxing your anaerobic conditioning far more than usual, but you’ll quickly notice the difference in high-rep bodyweight exercises like push-ups, dips and pull-ups. Faster Metabolism If you’ve heard anything about interval training, you’ve probably heard of the “afterburn” effect, the supposed increase in metabolism, long after you finish your workout. Well, that concept was popularized by the fitness community before there was much scientific evidence to support the concept. Well, recently, a team of researchers at the European Journal of Applied Physiology came up with a novel of method of testing the effects of interval training on metabolism. Because measuring metabolism directly is extremely difficult, they took a backdoor approach and measured the number of enzymes associated with glycogenolysis and anaerobic glycolysis in the muscle tissue, reasoning that the more such enzymes were present, the greater the metabolic effect of the workout. Their conclusion, after discovering a dramatically heightened enzymatic presence? “Interval training [...] is a potent stimulus to improve metabolism.” One final pitch for interval training? You can incorporate as much or as little of it as suits you. If you enjoy focusing on strength, by all means, keep the first half of your workout focused on lower reps and longer rest times, but feel free to speed through your accessory work by using interval training. This “best of both worlds” approach will have you gaining strength and burning fat with shorter, more intense workouts, which is a win-win in our books! 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