I mention on our ‘About Us’ page that one of the things that I do to stay in shape is interval training, which is an exercise program that I’d never heard of until about a year ago. But last January when Robin and I were still living in Riverton, I joined a gym that was about three blocks from our house called Fit Body Boot Camp. I was looking for a gym with a program that wasn’t just the same old, same old that I had done forever.
A word to the wise, be careful what you wish for.
Boot Camp is brutal, it is a training program that I’d never seen before and the only thing that I can compare it to in it’s intensity is high school football ‘two-a-days.’ It’s a program based on High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), which is (and I quote Wikipedia) ‘a cardiovascular exercise strategy alternating short periods of intense anaerobic exercise with less intense recovery periods, until too exhausted to continue.’
What that means in English is you bust your ass for 30-45 seconds at a time doing one exercise until you can’t do it anymore, then you switch to a different exercise and bust your ass for 30-45 seconds until you can’t do it anymore, and then…
Well, you get the idea.
After about 30 minutes of doing this you get to be done.
There are a couple of HIIT gyms in the St. George area but none of them are close to us. So, having done the Boot Camp thing for about three months last year I just decided to exercise in our yoga/workout/reading room and build my own workouts. I bought some equipment, although most HIIT exercises are body weight, there are a bunch that get enhanced (harder) with dumbbells, resistance bands and ankle weights.
The video below is actually a ‘trendy’ HIIT workout called the ‘7 minute workout,’ that was developed by The American College of Sports Medicine. This workout is kind of a super condensed version of a typical HIIT workout. There are 12 exercises that you do for 30 seconds each as hard as you can, with 5 seconds rest between each exercise, And you guessed it, that adds up to 420 seconds (ish), AKA 7 minutes. This is a link to a New York Times story describing the workout: https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/the-scientific-7-minute-workout/
These are the exercises (although I modified a couple of them in the video):
I alternate doing this one and my Boot Camp workouts and try to get in at least three workouts each week. I go through the 7 minute routine three times so that I end up with about 30 minutes of exercise (I can’t do the workout in 7 minutes, it takes me about 9 minutes, because I have to grab dumbbells, and reset my timer, and okay, some times I need a little extra rest). I’ve sped up the attached video so that no one falls asleep watching (and also because I learned how to do time lapse video on my phone, and there’s more to come). What you will notice is that I am still fat. There’s an old saying in the fitness world that ‘abs are made in the kitchen.’ In my case the saying would be that ‘abs are obscured by the Coors Light.’ I’m gonna work on the calorie intake but I’m not too optimistic.