Stay Fit through the Holidays: High Intensity Interval Training Tips

Before we know it, our bellies will soon be stuffed with warm deliciousness from our incredible Thanksgiving dinners with our families. Usually, I’m the one in the food coma complaining about how much weight in food I probably just consumed. However, working out will leave you turkey ready. After all, if you work out more, you get hungrier, so you can eat more. Win, win, win!

For a simple but effective workout, try High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). Basically, you’ll do intervals of hard work, then have a short rest, and go back to hard work again. While you can do this with any kind of exercise movement (weights, treadmill, Stairmaster, etc.), we’ll stick to the treadmill for this post. Here’s an example of interval training on a treadmill:

You can continue this pattern until you reach 15-30 minutes and adjust this to fit your schedule. You can use this as a guideline of how to structure your own treadmill workout. If you don’t have time to think about how you want to structure your intervals, just feel free to hop on the treadmill and be sure to adjust your incline and speed every other minute.

Running on the treadmill can be tedious, but doing intervals makes it a little better since your body is constantly changing its’ walk-jog-run mode. Personally, I like covering up the display on my treadmill with a towel (but still having access to the buttons) and adjusting it based on how I feel. For me, it’s a mental thing, so while I might think running 6.0 MPH is a lot, if I cover up the screen and put it at a number I don’t know but am comfortable running at, I’m usually running at 7.0+ instead.

You don’t have to stay inside on a treadmill either. If it’s a beautiful day out and you want to enjoy the fall foliage, just switch from walk-jog-run mode as you go from block to block. You can also do 30 second sprint intervals and 1 minute walk/jog rests with the timer on your phone for 10-15 minutes, which would still be an extremely effective workout. The cool thing about HIIT is not only do you burn more calories in a shorter amount of time, but you continue burning calories even after you finish your workout.

By working out before the holidays, you’ll not only make more room to eat all the goodies, but you probably won’t gain as much weight over the holidays. In fact, you might even be more conscious of what you choose to eat (i.e. 1 cookie instead of 5). Good luck, and happy interval training!