A Treadmill HIIT Workout You Can Customize to Your Time and Goals treadmill. Why should you pound out miles on a rolling belt inside when you can enjoy every step among the beauty of the outdoors, right? Well, a treadmill HIIT workout can save you from going all out in the Save the Workout Plan (or unsafe conditions like wildfire smoke) during the summer. When it gets dangerous and slippery in the winter, you’re probably better off spending time inside instead of trudging through the slush outside.
But even if the weather is ideal, the treadmill can help you hone in on several key aspects of your run training. Treadmills can help you master pacing and form, and allow you to do effective hill and speed training in a controlled environment, says Raj Hathiramani, incline interval training.
“By doing intervals with instant feedback on speed, you can benefit from understanding how changes in your pace correspond to changes in your perceived exertion—this allows you to run by feel,” he tells Runner’s World. “You can also incorporate effective Races - Places if you don’t have convenient access to hills.”
A Part of Hearst Digital Media form. If you notice you’re moving side to side, for example, keep yourself in the center of the belt by squaring up your shoulders and hips, Hathiramani suggests. Drive your arms forward and back, with elbows tucked to sides, and work on landing with feet directly under hips, he adds.
The Benefit of Treadmill HIIT Workouts
Interval training, or speedwork, How to Keep Legs Fresh endurance. This type of training “improves your aerobic capacity by making you quickly adapt to different speeds and become a more efficient runner,” Hathiramani says.
Research backs up the benefits of HIIT training, particularly for runners. For example, a systematic review published in 2017 found that two to three HIIT sessions per week (along with continuous running) for at least four weeks improved or how much oxygen you can take in a marker of fitness and or how much oxygen you can take in (a marker of fitness) and running economy, Master the Incline With These 4 Hill Workouts study published in 2018, examining 16 trained trail runners, found that sprint interval training was an effective and time efficient way to improve endurance and power, as measured through improvements in speed in a 3,000 meter-run, time to exhaustion, and peak power output.
To make sure you’re getting the most of your hard work, Hathiramani suggests avoiding back-to-back days of intervals Is My GPS Hurting My Performance? And More Common Questions on Why You Aren’t Getting Faster speed sessions per week.
A Treadmill HIIT Workout Designed for Speed and Power
RW+ Membership Benefits dynamic stretches to prep your body for some intense work. This workout, designed and demonstrated by Kristine Zabala, trainer and instructor at Barry’s in Philadelphia, includes two main segments, with four smaller interval blocks within each of those segments. The first main segment focuses on speed. You’ll ease into a fast and intense effort with a walk and jog, and after two minutes, you’ll start pushing your pace.
For the “jog” efforts, go at a pace you can still have a conversation and then for the “run” efforts, think about running comfortably hard—you should be able to talk, but it might be choppy, Zabala says. The “sprints” are your all-out speed—talking should feel nearly impossible—and try to get faster with each new sprint effort.
Best Running Headphones incline, which can Races - Places and power, We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back conquer hills. You’ll ease back into a faster pace at the start, and then begin adding that incline. Remember to lean into the hill—leaning forward from the ankles—pumping your arms and driving your knees up as you take quick steps. Think: tall posture, shoulders back, core engaged, Zabala says. The goal is to maintain your run speed while you kick up that incline.
Don’t forget to cool down Updated: Aug 11, 2023 9:33 AM EDT.
The best benefit of this treadmill HIIT workout: You can make it work for you by doing the full session, hitting both sprints and hills, for a sweat that lasts about 30 minutes. Add more time by repeating the sprint or hill block. Or, if you’re short on time today, stick to just the sprints or just the hills.
The Benefit of Treadmill HIIT Workouts
You can also follow along in the video at the top of the article where group fitness instructor Kristine Zabala talks you through the workout.
Mallory Creveling is an ACE-certified personal trainer and RRCA-certified run coach, who also holds certifications in kettlebell training, sports performance, and more. She has more than a decade of experience covering fitness, health, and nutrition for a wide range of publications, and nearly 10 years of experience as a trainer and fitness instructor. Mallory stays on top of her continuing education in fitness, as well as the latest science in wellness. She has worked with some of the best experts in their medical fields, and regularly interviews researchers, trainers, athletes, and more to find the best advice for readers looking to improve their performance and well-being. As a freelance writer, Mallory's work appeared in Women's Health, Self, Men's Journal, Reader's Digest, and more. She has also held staff editorial positions at Family Circle and Shape magazines, as well as DailyBurn.com. A former New Yorker/Brooklynite, she's now based in Easton, Pennsylvania.
