Weight Training Sweat Pants

Weight Training Sweat Pants

How Often Should You Be Doing Interval Training?

Interval training, and especially High Intensity Interval Training, is here to stay. It seems that overnight it has exploded in popularity, and now everybody is trying to fit some kind of interval training into their workout, eschewing the treadmill and instead mixing and matching up the new kind of training in an attempt to shock their bodies into new levels of performance and excellence. But some of these new workouts suggest that you should be doing interval training every day. Is this realistic? How often should you be doing interval training? In today’s article we’re going to take a closer look at this method of exercising, and help you decide what is optimal for you.

Interval training at its most technical simply means any form of exercise that is repeated at regular intervals. As such lifting weights could be considered interval training, or any other kind of exercise that is done with brief breaks in between. However, when people talk about interval training they often mean an series of reps that are brief in duration and very high in intensity, right up to high intensity interval training itself.

So what would one of these training sessions look like? You might sprint all out for thirty seconds,  and then jog for ninety seconds, and then sprint again, repeating this six times for a total of twelve minutes before declaring yourself done. You can lessen the break time to make the training more intense, but at its heart it would be something like this.

How often should you be doing this? Given that any interval training session of high intensity can last from six to twenty minutes and should leave you shuddering and panting and dripping sweat, you shouldn’t be doing it more than three times per week. More than that and you are either over training or not pushing yourself hard enough to begin with. Every other day is an excellent way to push your body, but more than that is probably either excessive or unnecessary.

Instead, you should seek to compliment your interval training with some other forms of training, whether its long runs or walks or a different variation of training. Swimming is an excellent alternative for all of its benefits, and you should seriously look into it. Just focusing on interval training however will bring you limited benefits in the long run, and for that reason if not any other you should seek to diversify your training regimen.

250lbs Deadlift (Non-Olympic Bar)