Three Superb Sprint Interval Workouts To Achieve Your Best Body“I am not afraid. I was born to do this.” –Unknown. Were you born to run? Regardless of your answer, you WERE born to move with force, to endure pain when the room is empty, and find out what your real limits are. You WERE born to have a lean, muscular body that is a pleasure to look at. Sprint training will help you achieve these outcomes, improve your athletic performance, and it’s been shown to be a “shortcut” to optimal health if you’re willing to put in the effort. This article will provide three superb interval models to guide your training for the best body and life.#1: The All- Purpose Athlete: The Best Sprint Program To Build Muscle & Lose Fat.
Sprint Training Program 100m SprinterResearch done on elite soccer and handball athletes shows how a short but intense sprint interval program can produce a significant anabolic hormone response to build muscle and lose fat. This study compared the effect of doing four all- out sprints in increasing distance order (1. Rest intervals were 4 minutes following the 4. Results showed that the decreasing order (4. The 4 Toughest Sprint Workouts You Can Do Take your workouts outside the gym and still get huge gains By Mackenzie Lobby. Interval training is all about balancing high-intensity bursts of speed with recovery time. Champion Sprinter Training Program! The idea of sprint drills is to rewire the CNS and. I am striving to become a member of the 2004/2008 Olympic teams in the 100m dash and 4x100 relay and to. This next model applies to the recreational athlete who might not be as well conditioned, but still wants to get lean while maintaining muscle. Researchers from Canada compared the effect of a 3- day- a- week, 6- week interval running program with an endurance protocol on body composition and time trail performance in young trainees. The interval protocol was six 3. The endurance protocol was 3. Results showed the following better results from the sprint program. The endurance group lost 5. Both groups increased muscle mass by a small 1 percent. You will improve conditioning, get faster, and be able to sustain a higher work rate for longer, as seen by the better performance on the middle- distance time trial.#2: The Strength Athlete: Improve Power, Conditioning & Anabolic Response. If your primary goal is to improve peak power and anaerobic conditioning, shorter intervals with less rest are the way to go. These models are ideal for combat athletes like wrestlers, judokas, and MMA fighters, but they could also benefit the strength trainee who just wants to be more athletically awesome. With a killer anabolic response, these short but sweet workouts will help you build muscle and get cut. Try six to ten repeats of 3. That’s what competitive wrestlers did twice a week for 4 weeks in order to achieve the following benefits. A similar study by judokas showed increase peak power of 1. A more favorable testosterone to cortisol ratio that indicates an environment that is beneficial for muscular adaptations. It’s too bad that the researchers in this study did not measure changes in body fat or lean muscle mass, since the wrestlers may well have improved body composition given the enhanced anabolic response. Try this model if you already have a base level of conditioning and want to maximize power and lean muscle development.#3: The Endurance Athlete: Lose Fat, Save Time & Improve Performance. It is in endurance athletes that we see the profound value of interval training. If your goal is endurance, but you still want to look jacked and be fast and strong, sprinting is your savior. And of course, you’ll save training time that can be devoted to other thrilling pursuits. A recent study had endurance runners in their 4. The interval protocol varied: Day 1 and 3 were ten 3. Day 2 was 6 intervals of 2 minutes at maximal speed followed by 9. Day 4 was 3. 0 minutes of tempo running at lactate threshold. The endurance protocol consisted of running at 7. Results showed the following greater body composition improvements in the interval group. They also improved running speed at the lactate threshold by 2. They improved speed at the lactate threshold by only 1. Junior 100 & 200m Sprint Training Program. Advanced 100m & 200m Sprint Training. This combined with an increase in the amount of energy burned in the 2. EPOC) led to greater fat loss. Leaner is always better when it comes to endurance performance, particularly when muscle is spared since it means you will have greater relative strength. Final Thoughts: To use this evidence to get your own results, consider the following energy- system principles. Make sure you maintain sprint quality and avoid the critical drop- off point where you get diminishing returns. The 6- Week Sprinting Solution ? Well, before we get into the program, let me tell you how this all started. I'm Getting Old(er)It's true. Less than six months from now I'll be 3. As I crest the rise of the hill leading the way into the twilight of my youth, I'm starting to realize what everyone has always told me is true: it sucks getting old. Now, before those of you in the 4. I'm completely aware that by most standards, I'm still quite young. I guess I should amend my statement to say, . Fact is, things were a breeze, especially in the fat loss department. When I was 2. 1- 2. I was a beast. I needed exactly three weeks . That meant if beach season started in June, I didn't really have to start prepping until sometime in May. I didn't know how good I had it. This year, I had to start my summer prep in late March. Even with my advanced fat loss workouts and my knowledge of diet, it still took me about 6- 8 weeks to get into the extreme lean shape that I like to maintain for the summer. To try to figure out what the deal was, I pulled out my training journals from the past several years and compared my summer prep. The first thing that jumped out at me was my diet. I used to eat the same thing every damn day! The foods were all healthy and even tasted good, but my culinary limitations certainly put a clamp on any kind of variation. But that wasn't the answer. While I enjoy a broader spectrum of foods today, my overall diet is very similar in terms of calories and macronutrients. I eat more foods, but I'm not eating more food. If anything, my diet has gotten better. I know a lot more advanced fat loss techniques than I did five or six years ago, and have tweaked practices like intermittent fasting, cheat days, and carb/calorie cycling to achieve impressive transformations with hundreds of soldiers in the growing Roman Empire. Looking more closely, the difference between what I did and what I was doing was sprinting. Back in the day, I used to sprint three times per week, without fail. Week. Now, I sprint about once per week. However, it's not quite that simple. While I sprint less often today, I've taken that into account in how I train today, and the added activity from my workouts more than makes up for it. This led me to ask, . It went pretty well; felt a bit like Ol' Roman lost a step or two, but I guess I shouldn't expect to hold onto my 4. I did this for two weeks. Then, Saturday morning of the second week, I got up and had a serious problem. Or perhaps, I woke up, because I certainly didn't get up . My hamstrings, glutes, and lower back were killing me, although I'd been aggressively foam rolling and stretching. I got some soft tissue work done . I was excited to get back to it because, to be honest, I was getting leaner already. I guess there is something special about sprinting after all. Well, Monday rolled around, and during my warm up, I damn near felt my hamstring pull off my femur. Why did this happen? This brings us back to the . It means that I can't recover as quickly. Add to that another problem: I'm too good at it. Between football and track, I learned how to truly sprint, not just jog really fast. I know the techniques, I understand stride, and I'm a power- based runner. All of which means that when I sprint, I do it correctly . While that's probably what makes sprinting so effective for me, it also makes it very taxing. Herein lies the problem. Sprinting seems to have an almost magical effect on fat loss, but the better you are at it, the more careful you have to be. If you're an advanced trainee, there's a threshold that you can't cross without greatly impeding your ability to recover. I set forth to figure out how I could fix it and get shredded like when I was a kid. I did a lot of experiments, ranging from decreasing the length of my sprints and just doing more of them, to packing all my sprinting into one day (bad idea). I managed to find what works the best . Not only will this sprint set up allow you to recover in a way that it won't interfere with subsequent sprint sessions, you won't even mess up your weight training workouts . You still need to rest. In this program, you'll be sprinting six times per week. If this all sounds counterintuitive given my injury woes from sprinting three times per week, consider this little wrinkle: in training, whenever you increase frequency, you have to adjust but (not necessarily decrease) volume. In a weight- training context, if you normally bench for ten sets on Monday and wish to increase your frequency, you could split up benching over two days, say five sets on Monday and Thursday. Now, instead of just doing five sets on each day, you could try six. Your total volume goes up, but your daily volume goes down. Taking it a step further, you could do four sets, three days per week. Finally, if you want to take it all the way, you could do three sets, five days per week. Your total is 1. 5 sets . Furthermore, you could also gradually increase the weight to increase results. Understanding this principle, I began applying it to sprinting. And what do you know, it worked. Over the course of a few weeks, I came up with: The 6- 6- 6 Sprinting Solution. Bam. It's that simple. Back when I used to do full sprint workouts three times per week, I'd perform 1. Each of these was a full- out sprint, lasting 2. Pretty obvious why it was so challenging, huh? I decided to up the frequency and keep the volume moderate. I wanted to sprint every day, as I predicted that this would allow me to drastically lower the volume to allow for recovery. After experimentation, I found that I could sprint six days per week with no issue. Then came the volume. I began with five sprints per day, meeting my total of 3. At 2. 0 seconds each, it would still be a challenge, but I thought I could do it. Well, it worked for a bit, but I started to feel burnt out again. I decided to look at volume a bit more deeply. I started looking at my total week work time; that is, my total amount of time spent sprinting. In my initial model of three days per week and 1. I was sprinting for a total of 2. In my first version of sprinting six days per week, that was simply divided over six days instead of three. That is, five sprints of 2. It was good, but I still felt like I wasn't recovering well enough. That's because, like you, I simply wasn't accustomed to daily sprinting. My legs needed more time to recover. So it was back to the lab again, this time to see if the workload could be tweaked. I reasoned (correctly) that if I allowed myself to build up to the total time workload, I could not only achieve 6. All with minimal time and a small daily commitment. Not too shabby. Okay, enough talk. Let's get to the workouts! The Triple 6 Workouts. The number in the work column of the tables below represents your work time, and the number in the rest column is your rest time. While you can do these as outdoor sprints, you'll run into the issue of clock- watching. Sprinting on a treadmill is a bit tricky. Be careful, and be sure to use the handrails as you jump on and off. When you're resting, simply grab the handrails and jump onto the side rails of the treadmill. To jump back on, grab the handrails and start sprinting again. Maintain your grip on the handrails for the first second or two. If you choose to train outside, my recommendation would be to sprint for distances instead of times. Take the given time and multiply it by 8; that's the distance you'll run in yards. So a 1. 0- second sprint becomes an 8. Your rest period is the amount of time it takes to briskly walk or jog back to the starting point. Each week, do a single sprint workout, six days per week. The workouts are structured to be progressive, allowing each week to build on the previous week. The time is how we measure progress week to week, so increasing your sprints because you feel strong one day is going to mess with the program. Ideally, do these workouts first thing in the morning. If you're going to be training in the morning, sprint first and train after. Stretch before and after. Insert other disclaimers. Don't be an idiot and hurt yourself. On to the show! Week 1. Sprint. Work. Rest. Sprint. Work. Rest. Cooldown: 4 min walk. Optional: 1. 5 min incline walk for extra fat burning. Total Sprint Time for the Workout: 8. Total Sprint Time for the Week: 5. Notes on Week 1: You'll notice that in this week you're sprinting for a total of 5. However, the important part here is the set up. You're never going to dig yourself into too deep of a hole, because the rest periods are structured to allow you a nice bit of recovery. There are only two sprints lasting 2. More importantly, each of those 2. This short follow up sprint won't tax you too much, so you can recover more effectively on subsequent rest periods. Overall, this will break you in and allow for some nice fat loss. Week one is also a good gauge of where your weaknesses may reside. If at the end of the workout you're winded, we've got some issues and you should repeat this. On the other hand, if you're not winded but having trouble closing out some of the sprints, that may be an issue with local fatigue, and will work itself out over the week. Week 2. Sprint. Work. Rest. Sprint. Work. Rest. 12. 01. 04. Cooldown: 4 min walk. Optional: 1. 5 min incline walk for extra fat burning. Total Sprint Time for the Workout: 8. Total Sprint Time for the Week: 5. Notes on Week 2: During the second week of the program, you'll notice that your total sprint times are the same. Where's the progression from week one? While your work time is unchanged, the structure of the workouts is what makes this a bit harder. You only have a single 2. However, from there you have to deal with three 1. This forces higher performance with less rest. While you're not doing more overall work than Week 1, you're allowed less recovery during the latter part of the workout. This will help increase work capacity and prepare you for more total work in the coming week. Moreover, having multiple .
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