The Ultimate HIIT Program For Burning Fat & Building Muscle

It’s not like there’s enough going on in an average day. There’s work, family, community commitments, and unexpected schedule changes that happen often in your day. Moms and wives don’t work a nine to five day. They work a wake up to go to sleep schedule. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to save time in the gym and still be able to burn fat so you can get in shape and look your best? What if I told you that there is a system that will help you do just that and you can do it in as little as twelve minutes a day with only four minutes of serious training? That is not a typo. If you’re interested (and how can you not be), then keep reading so you can learn about your new favorite word…Tabata.

What Is It?

tabata training, interval training, Muscle Mass Development — abata Training is a form of High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT, which is a protocol that involves alternating quick bursts of maximum intensity and effort and less intense segments that results in more calories being burned over a shorter period of time than traditional low intensity steady state cardiovascular exercise.

Tabata Training is a form of High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT, which is a protocol that involves alternating quick bursts of maximum intensity and effort and less intense segments that results in more calories being burned over a shorter period of time than traditional low intensity steady state cardiovascular exercise. For Tabata specifically, it requires performing an exercise for 20 seconds of maximum effort followed by 10 seconds of rest. You repeat this cycle seven times which would equal four minutes total.

Tabata has been around since the mid 1990’s but has really taken off in recent years. It’s named after Dr. Izumi Tabata, who measured the effectiveness of the training and published a study in 1996 based on the results. Although the program is named after him, he’s actually not the creator of it. Irasawa Koichi, a Japanese Olympic skating coach, is actually who developed the system we now know as Tabata Training. Tabata’s study compared six weeks of moderate intensity endurance training (an hour a day and five days a week) to six weeks of the training we now know as Tabata. The results were clear that Tabata was the better form of exercise,Muscle Mass Development, improving both anaerobic capacity and VO2 Max (measure of the maximum amount of oxygen an athlete can use) at the same time.

Although Tabata only requires four minutes of actual training, you can’t be expected to start with a 20 second sprint when your body is not prepared for that kind of activity. Warming up and cool-down time should also be considered. With a four minute warm up as well as four minutes to cool down afterwards, that means this program should take no more than 12 minutes out of your day.

When to Do It

Obviously with a program that is so short, this eliminates any excuse that is out there about not having enough time to train. So when can you do Tabata? Anytime that you have a few minutes to spare in your day. Regardless of how busy your schedule is, you can squeeze in such a brief amount of time in at any point during your day. Instead of trying to determine whether you should do it in the morning or evening, focus on just getting it in period. The best time for you to do Tabata for Muscle Mass Development is any time you have available. If you decide to do it first thing in the morning, you should eat a meal first as opposed to training without any calories at all since your body has already went so long without anything while you were sleeping. Something as small as a protein shake and a banana would be better than nothing.

Putting Tabata to Work for Muscle Mass Development

The original study to determine Tabata’s effects included Coach Koichi’s athletes training on exercise bikes but you can obviously implement it in any form of training. If you’ve never done this before, you should start with a less challenging activity like a stationary bike or an elliptical. Although the Tabata system itself is only four minutes, taking a couple of minutes to warm up before starting the clock is a good idea so you can get blood circulating early, helps Muscle Mass Development, allow synovial fluid to start producing in the joints, and also decrease the chances of injury. Once you’re warmed up and ready, the pattern over the course of the next four minutes will be as follows;

20 seconds all-out effort. 10 seconds rest.

Four minutes cool down.

During the 20 second segments, you are to give every ounce of effort you can. Hold nothing back until it’s time to take your brief rest. This will be as much of a mental challenge as it is a physical one by the time you get through the third minute and into the fourth. By the time you’re finished you should feel exhausted. If you’re able to do another 20 second segment after your final ten second break then you didn’t train hard enough during the four minutes.

Beginner Tabata Workouts for Muscle Mass Development

So now you know what it is and how it works. Now it’s time to put Tabata to the test. If you’re new to working out or if you’ve been training but never done Tabata before, it’s a good idea to try it with a form of exercise that is relatively simple to perform. Below is a list that you can consider choosing from when you’re ready to do it.

Stationary Bike or Bicycle on an Open Trail

Elliptical

Row Machine

Treadmill or Running at a Track

Arm Bike

Plank

Shadow Boxing or Hitting a Heavy Bag

Jumping Jacks

Bodyweight Squats

Swimming

High Knees

Stepping Up Your Tabata Skills

Once you feel the simpler movements are getting easier, you can either add resistance to the machines or a weighted vest for the bodyweight movements. You also can consider more challenging movements like the ones listed below.

Burpees

Jump Squats

Push ups

Medicine Ball Tosses

Skipping Rope

Stepper

There is also the possibility of doing more than one movement during the four minutes. You can perform jump squats for one segment, pushups during another, burpees during the next, and so on until you’ve done eight different exercises.

If you have more time to commit to cardio you can make it more challenging by doing more than one Tabata session. Perform your first Tabata workout as you normally would, take a two to four minute break and perform one more Tabata session either with the same movement or a different one if you wish to target more than one facet of your fitness.

Tabata Weight Training for Muscle Mass Development

Although Tabata has been associated with cardio, it can be just as intense if you take it to the weight room. For this purpose it’s not about saving time but rather but making the most of the time you commit to training. Let’s take the leg press as an example. After one or two warm up sets, you can load up a moderate amount of weight and instead of counting the number of reps, you watch the clock or timer and perform as many reps as you can within the 20 second segments. If you’re using a tempo of one second positive, two second negative, and a one second pause when the weight is closest to you, then you’ll perform around five reps throughout the 20 seconds. So after four minutes you could potentially do 40 reps in total which could be much more productive than a typical three sets of 10 reps protocol that so many weight training routines call for. Of course it will work with any bodypart but to show how this might look if you took it to the gym, a sample leg workout with Tabata Training may look like this.

5 minute warm up on treadmill.

Leg Press – 2 warm up sets of 15, 12 reps. 1 Tabata set.

Walking Lunge – 1 warm up set of 15 reps. 1 Tabata set.

Leg Extension –1 Tabata set.

Stiff Legged Deadlift – 1 warm up set of 15 reps. 1 Tabata set.

Seated Leg Curl – 1 Tabata set.

Calf Press – 1 warm up set of 15 reps. 1 Tabata set.

Seated Calf Raise – 1 Tabata set.

Conclusion

Tabata may be a form of training that you weren’t familiar with before today but now that you’ve learned all there is to know about how it works, you can make the program your own and use it to help you reach goals for Muscle Mass Development and save time in your already hectic day while doing it. The results you should get will make the maximum effort in minimum time worth it.

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