What Time Pressure?

Back when I was in college in the fast-receding days of the early 90’s, I used to shake off the crackling of my overtaxed brain synapses by hitting UVa’s Memorial Gym around 10 PM for an hour every night. I was pretty fanatical about it and rarely missed workouts, even during exam week. I always figured the time away from the books kept me just a little saner and more balanced than my fried-on-Mountain-Dew schoolmates (isn’t “Mountain Dew” the most ludicrous name for that swill? Just take a moment to reflect…).

Occasionally I couldn’t get to Mem by 10. Sometimes it was 10:15, or even 10:40 when I ran past the front desk attendant, scampered down the set of stairs to the left, ran past the equipment check-out desk, down the hall, and into the weight room. And the gym closed at 11!

But a weird thing almost always happened on those nights: I’d have a great workout. Of necessity, I’d cram in an hour’s worth of work into one-third the time. I’d break whatever time I had into bite-sized morsels and make sure I squeezed 20 sets into the 20 minutes I had before sprinting out the door like Indiana Jones racing from the Incan tomb, escaping just before the stone gate slammed shut behind him forever. Breathless, I’d stand at the edge of Memorial field, my muscles still quivering, take in the lovely sound of passing college women laughing loud and full over some shared secret, and gaze up at the Charlottesville stars winking at me from their place in the sky millions of miles above. I always felt great.

The point here: sometimes time pressure can be your best friend. Maybe you only have a half-hour to train, or maybe you just want to shake things up in your workout, so you set a time-pressure goal for yourself just for the challenge. Either way, it’s almost always useful and effective.

Doing an exercise for time instead of reps can be a real eye-opener. One minute of body-weight squats, doing as many reps as possible, can be just as agonizing—if not more so—than a set of 12 reps of loaded squats with no time limit. A minute of Bulgarian split squats and single-leg bridges on each leg, done the same way, can be sheer torture. Add plan old pushups, pull-ups, and situps done for a minute each and you’ve got yourself a pretty darn good workout right there. Take 30 seconds between sets, and you’ve fried every major muscle group in less than 12 minutes.

Half the reason I think boxing workouts are so tough and effective is that darn bell. You’re not thinking, I need to punch this bag 200 times. You’re thinking, I just need to keep going till the bell rings. Long after you probably would have thrown in the towel if the instructions had been “go as long as you can,” you’re still punching, giving it your all, waiting for that bell to ring so you can towel off and get yourself a drink.

Swimming workouts are all based around the clock in a similar way: you’re always working on that interval, knowing you have, say, two minutes to do 100 meters and rest before you have to start your next 100. Knowing that the faster you complete your swim, the longer rest you’ll have is a pretty great incentive to get the work done fast so that you have a good 40 seconds to pant at the edge of the pool instead of a paltry 20.

Sprint intervals of any kind are a great variation on this same principle: time at work and time at rest are tightly controlled. Tabata intervals, one of my favorite protocols, where you intersperse 20 seconds of max-effort work with 10 seconds of rest and transition, are also a terrific tool that works in much the same way.

These training methods, a mainstay in athletic training, are seeping into the mainstream. You still don’t see too many people working in this way at commercial gyms, but I certainly read a lot of articles about this or that trainer who holds a stopwatch and has his clients do a circuit of 45 seconds each of burpees, pushups, stepups, pull-ups, bodyweight squats, lunge jumps, and kettleball swings with 15 seconds rest between each movement. Do that sequence twice at max intensity and you’ll be a puddle—and you’ve only used up about 15 minutes of your day.

This kind of work has deservedly become the new go-to protocol for fat-loss and cardiovascular conditioning. I personally find this kind of workout brutal but very effective and remarkably energizing. Do it a few times a week and coffee becomes a redundancy.

My Training / Tabata Intervals

Quite some time ago this blog began as a training diary; a couple of people have been mildly interested in my training these days -- which I'll also touch on in a tip that's coming up -- but the bottom line is that I'm training for another season of triathlons. My first will be either June 9th or June 24th. Don't know whether I'm doing the one on the 9th yet, but now that I've written it I suppose I might have to. And I MAY just do one this weekend as well in Loma Linda, though that one's looking less likely as we may have a child care conflict.

So my training consists on a lot of swimming, biking, and running, in all kinds of fiendish combinations: fast bike/slow run one day; long bike up the hills/fast swim intervals; long run followed by sprint combinations... I mix it up. Good for a guy with the limited attention span I have.

My problem as a triathlete has always been that I don't have the patience to do a lot of really long, slow endurance work, so it makes me happy that this type of training has been taking a beating in fitness circles of late anyway. I've always felt a little on the inadequate side as a triathlete because I've never done, nor really aspired to do, an Ironman (2+ miles of swimming, 112 miles biking, 26+ miles running), primarily because, well, it's ALL long, slow distance work... for about 15 hours. Just doesn't interest me; I like speed; I like feeling the muscles working away, I like holding onto a modicum of the muscle mass I try to build in the off-season, so I much prefer the sprint distance: all out for an hour or so, much like a hard gym workout. Get it done, get out, go home.

A few weeks back, while on one of my seven-hour internet searches for new fitness information and techniques (long, slow internet hunting doesn't seem to be a problem for me), I discovered a technique (which was actually formulated and named about 11 years ago) called "Tabata" intervals, which are truly brutal but very effective. Those in the know will already be familiar with Izumi Tabata, Ph.D, a Japanese coach who came up with the 20 seconds on / 10 seconds off interval that sears body fat and raises the VO2 max to new and impossible heights. It's so brutal that the protocol calls for just four minutes of intense work: eight 30-second work/rest intervals in all. As long as you really push your limits during those 20 second intervals, four minutes (following a warmup and preceding a cooldown) is PLENTY. As Tabata himself notes -- with charming detachment -- in his report on the effects of this training protocol, "The subjects lay down on the floor afterwards." Yup, it's hard.

Hardcore gym rats do Tabata intervals with weight training, by choosing a full-body movement, selecting a medium-easy weight for themselves, and doing four minutes of 20 seconds on / 10 seconds off intervals. Front squats and "thrusters" -- a kind of front-squat/barbell-jerk combo -- are popular options. I confess I haven't tried this type of workout in the weight room yet, possibly out of blind fear of the stomach-churning consequences, but it sounds tough as hell. Instead, in the interest of developing greater speed and power for racing, I've been doing them on my bike, at the end of my harder running workouts, and in the pool -- the latter by doing all-out 25 yard sprints, resting 10 seconds at the edge of the pool, and repeating for a 200-yard interval workout at the end of my longer-distance work. As long as you stick to the time and intensity constraints, it seems to work. My swimming has indeed gotten faster and easier -- surprisingly so -- and I find myself able to bike and run at a higher intensity for longer periods as well. As the research suggests, Tabata seems to raise your ceiling a bit, making everything below top intensity a little easier.

The initial studies on Tabata indicated that subjects who performed this type of hardcore interval training experienced fat loss at a rate NINE TIMES faster than that of subjects performing a more traditional steady-state cardio workout. That's a pretty remarkable difference, and a little while ago some marketing genius attempted to capitalize on this little datum. Basically a few blokes built a piece of gym equipment that looked like a space-age exercise bike, claimed that four minutes a day on the machine would get you nine times the fat loss, and -- with a straight face, mind you -- slapped a $12,000.00 price tag on the contraption. This for a single piece of equipment intended for home use. Now I've never used one of these things, so it's possible that working out on it does indeed feel better than winning the lottery and nabbing an Academy Award while having sex with your dream lover, in which case it may well be worth the price tag. But short of that, it seems like you could substitute four minutes of Tabata-style bodyweight squats and save yourself the floor space, as well as a pretty hefty chunk of scratch.

I've been starting to recommend the Tabata interval to my fitter clients of late to see what kind of results they get out of it (Tabata is decidedly not for beginners). It's really a variation on the kind of sprinting work I've recommended in the past, but this particular interval seems to hit a metabolic sweet spot that keeps the body in EPOC mode (Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption, the acronym du jour for us fitness freaks) for an especially long time. And that's a good thing.