Saturday 080802

Tabata Intervals

touch jump

pushup

jump rope

shuttle run

ball slam

Perform each exercise for 20 seconds then rest 10 seconds. Repeat. Complete each exercise for 8 rounds before moving to the next exercise. Score is kept by totalling the lowest repetitions of each exercise.

What are Tabata Intervals?

"...Dr. Tabata and his colleagues at the National Institute of Health & Nutrition, Tokyo, Japan, reported: "[Six to 8 very hard 20 second intervals with 10 second rest periods] may be one of the best possible training protocols…” Dr. Tabata told Dick Winett in a personal communication: "The rate of increase in VO2max [14% in only 6 weeks] is one of the highest ever reported in exercise science." What’s more, anaerobic capacity increased by a whopping 28%."

"To our knowledge, this is the first study to show that sprint training dramatically improves endurance capacity during a fixed workload test in which the majority of cellular energy is derived from aerobic metabolism...in other words, about two minutes of very intense exercise (15 minutes over 2 weeks) produced the same or better results than previously shown after two hours a day at about 65% of VO2max, or 20 hours over two weeks." - More info on the Tabata research from Clarence Bass and Ripped.