Intervals are hands down one of the best ways to crank up the rate that your body burns fat. If you’re trying to drop weight but you don’t like the idea of spending hours and hours in the gym, you need to learn to utilize treadmill interval workouts.

Learn more about how this kind of training bumps up your caloric burn: Most Effective Training for Weight Loss

Far too often, people who are trying to lose or maintain weight will padlock themselves to a treadmill with a good book or gossip magazine and just spend and hour or two lugging away, tenaciously watching the calorie ticker go up and up… but they really aren’t paying much attention at all to their “workout”, and it can make the time they do spend at the gym relatively futile.

Treadmill interval workouts force you to be aware of your body and your exertion level, and if it’s not high enough you can quickly adjust it- instead of wasting time at the gym, spending an hour and a half unenthusiastically putting one foot in front of the other while reading about a celebrity's newest drama disaster.


Warm up:
Walk at a comfortable pace at zero incline for 5 minutes.

Walking Interval:
Crank your intensity up a notch from your warm up; you may also want to add a bit of an incline into the mix. Everyone's exact mph will be different but you should be walking fast enough that holding up a conversation would be moderately difficult. Hold this pace for 2 mintutes.

Running interval:
As soon as you've finished your 2 minute walking period, dive straight into a minute long running interval. Again, the exact pace is going to depend on many different variables, however, you should be working hard enough that you would rate your exertion at 8 or 9 out of ten. You should not be able to hold up a conversation during this period and reading any smutty celeb magazines should be nearly impossible!

Repeat, alternating intervals for ten repetitions for a total of a 35 minute routine
As soon as you finish either interval, go straight into the next one. Repeating this pattern 10 times makes for a 30 minute plan, 35 including your warm up. Be sure and do a 5 minute cool down and stretch thoroughly when you're finished.


This burns about 320 calories (exact figures will depend on your weight, fitness level, muscle content, ect) and stokes up your metabolism. Do this workout 3-4 days of the week for your cardio fix; you can also easily couple this routine with a strength training component.

If you or your joints aren’t fans of running or jogging, you can still get your heart rate up and implement the fat blasting interval structure; try the Treadmill Incline Workout.


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