This is an excerpt from an Elite Body interview with Turbulence Training creator Craig Ballantyne about what is interval training.

Jim:    Let me ask you this, for people who don’t know, what is interval training?

Craig:    Sure.  But, before I mention what interval training is, I always want to make sure people understand they need a more thorough warm up when they are doing an interval type workout compared to just doing 30 minutes on an elliptical machine.  Just make sure that you do a little extra, build up your intensity over the five or ten minutes before you do your interval training work.

When you get to the . . . when you’re fully warmed up and ready to go, interval training is basically an alternating balance of hard work — harder than normal work is what I like to call it — paired with easier than easy work.  So, and this is tough for a lot of cardio people to get the mental breakdown of, because a lot of . . . everyone’s taught that you have to keep your heart rate up; that heart rate is this magical thing for fat loss.

I like to say that heart rate basically means nothing for fat loss.  You can elevate your heart rate all sorts of ways in both healthy and unhealthy ways and none of that will actually predict how much fat you will lose.  I mean, it’s not; it’s like saying sweating is really important for fat loss.  Sweating, heart rate, those are just side effects of the work you are doing.

So interval training – sorry, I just forgot what I was talking about there – but interval training is periods of harder than normal cardio, so I like to tell people we’re going to work on a scale of 10 here.  If your normal cardio is a 6 out of 10 intensity, think of that, then our interval training is going to be anywhere from an 8 to a 9 out of 10 intensity.  We’re going to really bump it up.  We’re not going to run for our lives, but we’re going to be working at a pace that we can only do for 30 seconds, 60 seconds, maybe 90 seconds in some intervals.

That’s what the interval work training is.  Then we decrease it down to what I call 3 out of 10 intensity level for our recovery interval which is often, especially for beginners, it’s going to be two or three times as long as the work interval.  If we were doing beginner interval training where an overweight individual was walking at 3.8 miles per hour for their first interval, they would walk that for 60 seconds let’s say, and then they would take it down to 3.0 miles per hour for their recovery interval, even though they could do something like 3.5 miles per hour for 30 minutes.

That’s the big mistake most people make.  We’ll use a more advanced example here, but most people make the mistake of working too hard in the recovery period.  For example, let’s say we take a fit woman.  She runs her intervals at 7.5 miles per hour and then during her recovery, a lot of women will make that mistake of only dropping it down to 6 miles per hour.  That’s still cardio training, and people think that the heart rate’s got to stay up there, so they don’t decrease the intensity because they’re worried about their heart rate dropping.

Again, we don’t care pretty much about what our heart rate is.  It’s kind of interesting to look at the numbers and if we were getting really technical about performance training, we’d worry – we wouldn’t worry, but we’d monitor the recovery heart rate and say when the heart rate got down to maybe 120 beats per minute, we’d do our next interval.  For fat loss, we don’t necessarily care about that.  What we want to do is make sure that the heart rate does have a chance to decrease, because we’re going to go at a very, very easy pace.

It doesn’t matter how fit you are.  It doesn’t matter if you are fitter than I am, and I can do my intervals at 12 miles per hour on the treadmill.  I’m still going to go all the way down to 3.0 miles per hour and do my recovery.  I’m using just the treadmill here, so you have to extrapolate that over to the bike or to the elliptical machine to whatever level it is.  You’re probably going down to a level 2 – maybe not a level 2 – maybe a level 3 or 4 on a bike or an elliptical machine where it’s like a walk in the park sort of intensity.  That’s your recovery pace.
Then you jump back up, jump back down, jump back up, so you do about six of those intervals where you work hard and then you recover.  That should only take about maybe six to 10 minutes of total work time and then you finish with a cool down.

That should be a total 20 minute work out there from the warm up to the cool down.
And that’s interval training.  So hopefully that long explanation cleared it up for folks. It’s really just alternate intensity.  If people are using the machine for this, I do prefer that they use the manual settings and control t this themselves rather than relying on the hill program or interval program on the machine.  Nothing wrong with those, but generally they are set up to take longer and don’t get you the results.  They maybe don’t get you through enough intervals or something.  You may as well just control it manually.

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Craig Ballantyne, creator of Turbulence Training: “I came up with this in the late 90s.  I was finishing graduate school, and  was doing a lot of research in the cardiovascular area.  We were actually looking at . . . in my Master’s degree study, we were looking at what happens to power and performance in young men when they do a lot of endurance training.  So, we expected to see a decrease in their power and performance.

So I was taking a look at a lot of cardiovascular research; a lot of internal training research; this in addition to me working with a lot of athletes and in addition to me working with people to lose body fat.  At the time, I was training a lot of athletes with interval training.  I’ve been using this for quite a long time now for performance, and, you know, we noticed that some of the research is also showing that fat loss would be increased by the interval training.  It’s really come out in a lot of recent studies.  Well, not a lot of recent studies, but a few recent studies in the past couple of year, so we were a little bit ahead of the curve.

When I was doing all that studying, you know, that fun lab work, I was really, really busy.  I mean I was in there 7:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. some nights where I just, you know, running this blood through these fancy schmancy machines and, you know, this was in the hospital at my university.  So I’m halfway across campus to the gym, and I didn’t want to not work out during this time.

I had about 45 minutes while this one what’s called a gamma counter; so we’re talking about radioactive isotopes going on counting; so, it had 45 minutes for this machine to do its thing on some blood work that I had put together.  I had time to zip over to the gym, do my work out and get back.  That’s all the time I had for it, and, you know, I’ve been body building since I was 16; then moved into a bit more – I wouldn’t say power lifting, but more like athlete strength training type stuff – my own personal work outs.

Again, with the athletes I was working with, I basically I just put it all together.  I like to use the phrase, “I put all this information together in my mental blender” and came up with what I call Turbulence Training which was simply the supersets that I stole from the body building world combined with the interval training which I stole from the athletic world and together if you take a look at . . . if somebody; a body builder and athlete used that type of training, they would be very lean, very fit, very Men’s Health/Women’s Health type body.

That was in 1999 I was doing that.  In 2000, I started working with Men’s Health, so I kept getting more and more into the fast workout – the dumbbell – the stuff you can do at home in your basement sort of thing, not have to go to a fancy gym.  Then over the years, it’s evolved into a lot more body weight training as well, because that’s just been what people have wanted.

That’s the evolution of it.  The philosophy behind it is simply to work the way you were used to and work less as frequently your sets – well, fewer repetitions per set, generally fewer exercises than the body building stuff I grew up with; and, obviously, cutting back on the cardio volume and just doing interval training.  It’s an increased quality of training, decreased quantity of training.

Our whole purpose is to put the body into what I call turbulence.  That just means putting it outside its comfort zone like a plane going through turbulence in air.  I came up with that actually on a flight, I think if my memory serves me correctly.  That’s the whole philosophy.  That’s the mindset, the imagery I want people to do.  It’s getting outside their comfort zone, you know, training hard but of course training safe.  We’re not doing anything unsafe here, so there’s definitely a progression in building up to this stuff.  That is how it goes down.”

If you’d like to hear more of Craig’s interview, sign up for the F*ree Elite Body Expert Series.