The Truth about Tabata: A fitness trend taking hold in Toronto

The Secret of Tabata: Start sweating

I'm so happy to see a fitness trend take hold that's all about getting out of the long winded steady state cardio workouts and into high intensity training. I would love even more if this would forever get people out of reading magazines or watching TV while working out.
Come on people! It takes a little discomfort to get fit.


THE WHOLE TABATA TREND FITS WITH

NO PAIN NO JANE


The Tabata Protocol--named after Izumi Tabata, Ph.D., a former researcher at Japan's National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Kanoya--is an interval routine developed by the head coach of the Japanese speed-skating team. (It's called a protocol because Tabata and his team took the speed-skating coach's workout and studied it to quantify just how effective it really was.)

The workout consists of six to seven 20-second full-speed sprints interspersed with rest periods of 10 seconds.

What's happening in the fitness world is people are calling almost any high intensity workout or circuit within a workout TABATA training. Hey, if throwing around a trendy word gets people out of doing easy workouts that don't provide results then great!

BUT a pure TABATA workout is as above: a high intensity burst at full anaerobic capacity for 20 seconds followed by a 10 second rest period.

There's been lots of research to show the benefit of intense bursts of exercise over steady state cardio. The main fat burning benefit of TABATA comes in the fact you are building Type II muscle fibres (the ones sprinters have more of) vs. Type I muscles fibres (the ones marathoners have more of). And we all should know by now that the more muscle we have the faster our metabolism.

"High-intensity resistance training offers the stimulus necessary to tell the body it requires muscle. The body maintains protective margins against stress, and exercise is a stressor. When a muscle is taken to failure (the point where continued contraction is impossible), an alarm is triggered, telling the body its protective margins are in danger and it must adapt to maintain itself. Hence, muscle will be spared at the expense of fat. This is the method of discriminated weight loss."

Taking it all off: high-intensity resistance training promotes fat loss without muscle depletion by Robert Serraino

If TABATA were what some people think it is, then it ain't so new after all. I've been teaching high intensity interval and circuit training since I started offering boot camps 8 years ago. High Intensity Training (H.I.T. ) first got a name back in the 70's. The main difference between any type of H.I.T. training and TABATA is the rest to work interval.
H.I.T. has a 1:2 work rest interval
TABATA has a 2:1 work rest interval.

A pure TABATA workout would only have one 4 minute set preceded by a warm up and short cool down. But a 4 minute workout won't improve body awareness, help you learn bio mechanics or improve structural balance. But if all you have is 4 minutes to workout which everyone does, then TABATA just took another excuse away from you. And if you don't have a good base of fitness, body awareness or have any medical issues, then TABATA is OUT OUT OUT!

Any of my Urban Warrior peeps can attest to the intensity of our stair climbing, drills in the room and the no stopping workout circuit we do.
If they want to call it TABATA, no problemo as long as they're sweating!

Here's a link to a TABATA kettlebell squat interval

Here's a link to TABATA cycling interval


In both of these you can see their rest to workout ratio holding true to TABATA. Also note there is NO opportunity for magazine reading. Excellent.