Jim Katsoulis: Talk a little bit about  the Tabata protocol, if I’m pronouncing that right. Talk a little bit about – explain what the Tabata protocol is and how it influenced 7 Minute Muscle and your ideas of training.

Jon Benson: Okay, yeah. Tabata is a Japanese researcher that a lot of fitness guys were quoting in the ‘90s especially when this study first came out in the early 2000, that Tabata, he just – he came up with this ridiculously intense protocol which later just became high intensity interval cardio, interval training that basically pushed people well beyond their lactate threshold for only periods of time, like brief periods of time, 30 seconds sometimes, the protocol for that are that short, followed by duration periods where you’re at – where you’re exercising at a normal pace.

So, it’s just basically – it’s a glorified version of interval cardio. And what the studies where he was most impressive, and that these studies had been duplicated, is the actual – the O2 increase, in other words, your oxygen, how much oxygen can your system use efficiently. And he was seeing just rapid, massive increases in the body’s ability to process oxygen, which means your cardio – it means that your cardio health is increasing basically. And since then a lot of guys had tried to apply that fat burning and it does work for fat burning if you do it right, and if you’re willing to do a little bit of low-intensity walking, things like that, along with it.

But I’ve always believed that fat burning was 80 percent nutrition and so the cardio is just on top of this. So, I have a version of – it’s just totally different than Tabata, to be honest with you. But it’s based – Richard’s study – Dr. Richard Winett came up with a protocol called GXP or Graded Exercise Protocol actually before Tabata if I’m not mistaken and he’s had four different university tests done, and that’s the protocol I suggest that people use.

So, the 7 Minute Muscle protocol, obviously, I developed but I quoted everyone that I actually said this is the guy who influenced me here, this is the guy who influenced me here, but the 7 Minute Muscle is totally different in the way that protocol is put together but it’s influenced by guys like Vince Geronda, it’s influenced by EDP training, by – there’s just a myriad of different influences that come into it. But the cardios are like Dr. Richard Winett’s and – so, Ageless Athletes. It’s a very, very good website. And it’s nine minutes long and I used it for years. I had used it for years. And it’s by far and away more effective than trying to do something ridiculous like the 45 minutes of cardio a day. It is, you know, unless I’m four weeks away from a photo shoot, there’s no point in it.

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.