Always Time for a Quickie: Tabatas

What better way to kick start the week than with a bit of Monday Morning Motivation (say that 5 times fast):

We’re all busy and it’s easy to fall back on the “I don’t have time to exercise” excuse.  Occasionally I do too, but deep down I know that it’s BS. The bottom line is that it comes down to priorities: If it’s important to you, you will make time for it, no ifs no buts.

Last week I mentioned that I’ve been incorporating tabata training into my workouts.  Especially as I prefer to get my day started early in order to make the most of my trip in London, this workout style is ideal.  As long as they are effective, workouts don’t need to be a long, drawn out affair.  Efficiency aside, tabatas can be done anytime, anywhere, without any special equipment.

As a form of high intensity interval training, tabata training can create similar health benefits to that of cardio workouts…in a fraction of the time. So what exactly is it?

It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid: it’s painful yet over before you know it.  Although each tabata is essentially 4 minutes, you can stack multiple 4-minute tabata routines together.  The key is to take a 1-minute break between each round in order to briefly recover.  While tabatas may burn fewer calories during the workout than a long walk would, they require your muscles to work harder.  As a result, it boosts your metabolism and enables it to continue burning calories even after the workout is over.

Especially as tabata workouts are completely customisable, there’s little room for boredom to creep in.  To get you started, here’s a workout I completed on Friday morning.  Hopefully this will enlighten my brother about why exactly I was jumping around our living room as he was leaving for work.:

If you don’t have a stop watch or timer, download the GymBoss Timer app.  Once you select the tabata setting, it will start beeping to indicate the start & stop of each interval.

How do you fit exercise into your busy days? 

30 thoughts on “Always Time for a Quickie: Tabatas”

  1. Tabatas certainly do ROCK and are tough to say the least, but yeah, you get a bang for your buck! Great workouts here too 🙂 I haven’t done them in awhile though, as I need to do lower intensity stuff for now… but I will get back to them in time!

  2. I make sure to work out in the AM, then I know nothing will “come up” or get in the way of an afternoon workout. Although I work harder in the PM, it’s not a guarantee that I’ll be able to get to the gym, so I schedule it first thing. Love the quickness of Tabata workouts for those days when the gym just isn’t going to happen, though!

  3. Awesome little workout! I laughed when you said now your brother knows why you were jumping round the lounge room! I hope you are enjoying London!!!!

  4. I was totally the queen of “i don’t have time to exercise” excuse! Now, like you said, i just make it a priority and not surprisingly, there was time to exercise all along.. i just didn’t want to before. Haha! I’m going to have to try these tabatas soon!

  5. I LOVE tabatas! It’s been way too long since I’ve incorporated them into my routine though; I’ve been following a heavy lifting program 5 days/week, so I usually crave longer runs or elliptical sessions when I do cardio. However, I’ve been getting a bit bored with those, so it’s time to mix things up again! I’m a grad student, so I usually workout during the day, when everyone else is at work. However, after I graduate this coming December that’s going to change. I’ll be up at 5:00am hitting the gym! During my first job after college, I quickly learned that if I don’t workout in the morning, it never happens. 😉

    1. Please make the most of mid-day workouts while you can- I certainly miss those! Sounds like you’ll be all set when you enter the working world- I almost always opt for morning workouts because chances are something else will come up later on in the day!

  6. When I have no time for workouts or planning ones, I turn to Tabata too. It’s easy! Well not easy (while you’re doing it) but it’s easy to get into one. Tabata squats alwayssss make me super sore for days afterwards!

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