Tabatas!

Juliann Lynch, BS, CSCS

Let’s be honest. Prevail would probably FALL APART if it weren’t for the organization, diligence and expertise of our lovely office manager, Jade Mundell. She’s available and cheerful, a mom of three and LOVES to workout hard! It is my privilege to get to lift with Jade 3-4 days each week!





Best training buds post workout #4!

Jade and I love to try new workouts. We frequently implement a form of interval training at the very end of our lifts, much like our clients get to experience after a Saturday morning Metabolic Blast with Peter or a Sparq class with Chris Tuesdays and Thursdays. Currently, our favorite type of interval training is called a Tabata. To quote Izumi Tabata, the inventor the Tabata workout and Japanese researcher, “six to eight very hard 20-second intervals with 10-second rest periods may be one of the best possible training protocols."

Tabatas, which Jade and I lovingly refer to as “Chewbaccas,” are a type of interval training that gets.it.DONE in just 4 minutes! That’s it! Heart rate up, calories obliterated, endorphins at max, BOOM! Tabatas create an EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption), meaning your body has the potential to recover, rebuild and burn more calories longer than it would after running at a medium pace for 30 whole minutes!! So why not give it a whirl?

Last month, Jade sent me a link to a full body Tabata workout. We decided to try the workout once per week for a month. We made some things harder, rounded out others, and had a really good time. We scored each workout on a sweat scale of 1-INFERNO.

Here’s how the workout changed from week one to week 4:Each of the six mini-circuits below was completed four times for a total of eight working sets. There was ten seconds of rest in between exercises. 

Some of the circuits (in yellow) remained the same each of the four weeks and we saw marked improvement in our performance over the course of the month. The sweat scale gradually increased to an "8" as we set goals and increased the difficulty of the exercises. Overall, we had fun and learned a lot about how to push ourselves and each other.

Just for fun, I encourage you to chat with one of the coaches at Prevail Conditioning to learn more about tagging a Tabata on the end of one of your next workouts. Grab a buddy, it's always more fun with some competition and a friend! We would love to help you pick a few exercises that fit into your personal training goals.

Train hard, have fun and smile a lot!

~Juliann Lynch