HIIT Treadmill

High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is a workout designed to elevate your heart rate quickly, take you out of your comfort zone, and give you just enough recovery time between sets so you can ramp it up and increase your exertion over time. It’ll get your body moving faster and harder than a typical steady-paced workout. HIIT can be the aerobic push your body needs to shake it out of its workout complacency and help keep you motivated toward your fitness and health goals.

Our bodies adapt to our lifestyle so adding a HIIT class is like a splash of cool water during a warm shower. If you’re like me, you’ll ask yourself what the heck is happening and why. Then, post-workout, you’ll feel your metabolism keeping the caloric burn going. It feels amazing. (Note to self, hide the snacks. After a HIIT workout I feel like filling the caloric void I just created.)

The perceived rate of exertion is on a scale of one to ten and we self-assessed during Ranch Instructor Marcos Landavao’s HIIT Treadmill class. I could have brought a heart monitor and really targeted zones but this method worked great! He told us we could adjust to our own comfort, or discomfort.

After a few minutes of easy warm-up on the treadmill, we increased the speed and began medium-paced intervals; 1 minute in the blue or hard zone and a few minutes in the light zone. We repeated this several times. And then we ramped it up harder in the middle of the workout and pushed into the red zone or “very hard”, “that’s where the good stuff happens,” he tells us, “right when you are in the red zone and working hard.”

“This is a great workout for anyone who doesn’t want to run on a trail or outside in the middle of the day,” Marcos told me later. “You wouldn’t want to do this every day,” he added. “If you’re doing it right it’ll be really challenging. I’d say two to three times a week tops.”

Learn more the 11 gyms at The Ranch.