Tabata Workout.
During the cold winter months, many of my London personal training clients understandably prefer to train indoors rather than face frozen pavements, icy winds and torrential rain.
Here is a great Tabata workout for those winter days when you feel like going for a run or an outdoor workout, but the weather outside is just too harsh.
Tabata training is a form of high intensity interval training which was developed in the 1990s by Professor Izumi Tabata.
This form of training is a great way to get fit using short, sharp workouts.
It’s one of the personal training workouts we give our clients at 121 personal training.
Tabata workouts improve both your aerobic and anaerobic fitness, and are also great for burning fat and stabilising blood glucose levels.
Studies have shown that Tabata training produces similar results in cardiovascular fitness to steady state cardio training – yet your typical Tabata workout takes far less time to complete than your typical ‘cardio’ workout.
I have found Tabata training to be an excellent way to condition the body and build muscular endurance, whilst also reducing stress levels.
Tabata training involves working flat out on an exercise for 20 seconds and then having 10 seconds rest.
This process is completed for 8 rounds of each exercise, making a total of 4 minutes per Tabata exercise.
This Tabata workout contains four different exercises – each one to be repeated the 8 times.
Rest for one minute between each different exercise.
This Tabata workout should take around 20 minutes to complete.
The entire workout is made up of bodyweight exercises which do not require a huge amount of space – perfect for those freezing cold days when you want to train but don’t want to leave the house!
Tabata Workout.
Bodyweight squats – 8x 20 secs work/10 secs rest
Rest 1 min
Press ups – 8x 20 secs work/ 10 secs rest
Rest 1 min
Burpees – 8x 20 secs work/ 10 secs rest
Rest 1 min
Planks – 8x 20 secs work/ 10 secs rest
Try to work at maximum intensity during the twenty second work intervals – the goal is to complete as many repetitions of each exercise as you can.
Think of it as a series of sprints – apart from the planks – which in this case are more for your general and abdominal/lower back conditioning.
Hope you enjoy the workout!
