Interval Training
Though I had planned to keep the workouts easy this week, I had a little extra energy on Tuesday and decided to try running intervals. I had a 10-minute warm-up on the treadmill before running five one-minute intervals with one minute of recovery between intervals. Once I completed the intervals, I had 10 minutes of recovery followed by 20 minutes of active recovery.
As you can see from the graph, the wave is compressed, meaning that my heart rate didn’t reach the ideal max when I was running or the ideal low when I was recovering between intervals. This is typical when restarting cardio training and is the very issue intervals are meant to address.
Below is the graph from one of my workouts before the shutdown of the gyms in 2020. During this workout, I ran five two-minute intervals. The peaks are flatter due to the longer time interval. The maximum heart rate is also higher and consistently goes into the red zone soon after I start running meaning that my heart starts working harder as soon as my body needs it. There’s also a much stronger recovery between intervals, with the heart rate consistently returning to the green zone and reaching a low of 128 bpm even before running the last interval. During Tuesday’s workout, the lowest heart rate between any interval was 144 bpm.
As you can see from the graph, there was also a quicker recovery after completing all of the intervals, with an average of just over 100 bpm during the recovery period. On Tuesday, my heart rate averaged around 112 bpm during recovery.
In short, interval training is beneficial for maintaining an efficient cardiac response to exertion. In the everyday world, my heart rate quickly increases when taking a flight or two of stairs, leaving me less tired when I reach the top. Likewise, my heart rate stays lower for less strenuous tasks like walking. Overall, this means less fatigue and better exercise tolerance.