Monday nights can often be the worst nights in the gym, the air is a mix of weekend regrets coupled with the start of the week blues. All in all, it's quite a grim picture. So on Mondays, I like to keep it simple with a brutal 20-30 High-Intensity Interval (HIIT) session to focus on fat loss.
A casual Monday night at the gym.
Time or effectiveness?
I think you can argue about the effectiveness of intervals vs steady-state cardio but I will pose a few points about why I personally favour them.
- Time: Be done in 20-30 mins
- Engaging: I struggle with longer cardio sessions often from a boredom point of view but I'm sure many others disagree with me here.
- Payoff: For my goals of cutting fat and maintaining muscle mass, I find these workouts ideal.
My workout - Treadmill sprints
5 min warm-up
Once sufficiently warmed up, I move onto the interval phase with each one consisting of the following.
- 1 min sprint ( I aim for speeds over 13km/h) on an incline (+5%)
- 2 min recovery phase (slower pace, 1-2% incline)
Repeat 5-10 times depending on fitness.
Finisher (optional)
Next, I move over to the sprint treadmill (not all gyms have them) and try 1-3 high resistance sprints for 15 sec each.
If you did everything correctly you should look like this:
Enjoy,
Tom
References
HIIT training and fat loss
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2991639/
Fat loss mechanisms of HIIT