Guest Article- Quick Treadmill Workouts

Ohiyo readers!  I’ve got another guest article for you all today.  This one is written by Alex Johnson, a fitness writer for Health Clubs at Home; suppliers of new and used treadmills for sale.

You don’t always have hours to spare for a leisurely run in the gym, or for a full interval training session. So what can you do when you have fewer than 45 minutes to work out?

One answer is a High Intensity run that will really get the blood pumping and the Heart Rate up. There us one such workout that I have been doing for a while now to fit in to my busy schedule.

The plan is very simple; starting at 10mph at an incline of just 1% you then run for 30 minutes increasing the speed by 0.2mph for every minute. This doesn’t seem like much, but at a sprinting speed for probably the last 10 minutes after a 20 minutes fast jog you really start to feel it!

The main piece of advice though, is that you need to warm up thoroughly, then cool down as well, which is not always focused on but I am a firm believer in it, and you will thank yourself in the morning!

For the warm up, try and include some static and dynamic stretches, try not to stay in one area as this workout gets very quick from the outset so you don’t want to rip a muscle just because you didn’t fancy warming up your quads!

One other option for those short on time is the pre-programmed workouts, almost all of the commercial Treadmills will offer this functionality. One of the best for this is the interval training program. Especially when you set the high and low speed yourself, then set the overall time (in this case say 30 minutes) and it will divide your time up in equal increments until you finish. Where the Treadmill comes into its own here is the (usually) fancy display, telling me how far away I am from the next up or down, which is great on the sprints as looking at it, it looks nicer when it only looks like a few seconds before slowing down. This way you are always in that positive mindset of ‘almost the rest now’ and then ‘it’s only a few minutes of sprinting’ and will this positivity you will carry on throughout and no doubt feel like you could go again.

The final benefit of all of this is one of the best features that the Treadmill offers. This is the data at the end of the run; the calories, distance and all of the other pieces of information that comes too. Motivation comes from seeing constant progression and that is something that you will see on the Treadmill, you know how the run has gone and if it felt good you will no doubt see that it was good!

So no more excuses, if you have a free half an hour then jump on the Treadmill and make it count!