"Tabata Protocol" Workouts Now Offered on Xpress Workouts

I have created some awesome 4-Minute workouts utilizing the Tabata protocol method and placed them on my Xpress Workouts website. These workouts are really intense due to the very short rest intervals. Originally, the Tabata Protocol was created for cardiovascular training, not resistance training. However, there is no reason not to incorporate this style into your resistance exercise routines. You can click HERE to see the category at the Xpress Workouts website.

A Little Background on the Tabata Protocol:

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.

In Tabata's study, the researchers found that guys who used the routine five days a week for six weeks improved their maximum aerobic capacity (a measure of your body's ability to consume oxygen--the more oxygen you can take in, the longer and harder you'll be able to run) by 14%. What's more, it also improved anaerobic capacity (which measures your speed endurance, or the duration you're able to sprint at full effort) by 28%. So the Tabata Protocol is the rare workout that benefits both endurance athletes and sprinters--hard to accomplish. Consider: A study of traditional aerobic training--running at 70% of aerobic capacity for 60 minutes--for the same number of weeks showed an improvement in aerobic capacity of 9.5% and no effect on anaerobic capacity.

So again, what I have done is utilized the Tabata principles into creating a series of workouts that challenge you with 20 seconds of resistance exercise with only a 10-second rest period. The exercises I picked are only multi-joint, large muscle group oriented so you expend the most amount of energy and calorie-burning in the shortest amount of time (4-minutes).

Robert Garza, CPT, RTS
www.xpessworkouts.com