Fat Burning Workout: HIIT Treadmill

This Fat Burning Workout uses the principles of High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) on the treadmill, to give you a great workout with a piece of equipment which is the most popular cardio-vascular exercise machine in the USA today.

If you're considering buying your own treadmill, check out our feature article on How to Choose the Best Treadmill to Blast Calories Fast!

High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) has long been recognized as a terrific way to trigger fast fat loss with a fat burning effect which carries on way after the exercise itself has finished.

You could easily adapt this workout for outside use if you prefer to run outdoors but the advantage of using a treadmill is the use of incline & speed settings which you can record in your workout journal (you do record your workouts don't you?) so that you can measure your progress.

We've used a technique in this workout called 'effort level'  (other names for it include 'perceived effort level' and 'intensity level'). Effort Level is a scale from 1 to 10 where level-1 is stationary (sitting down or even sleeping!), level-3 would be light walking, level-5 might be walking briskly, level-7 would be sweating heavily and only just able to talk if you really had to, level-9 would be only able to last just over a minute at this pace and level-10 would be absolutely flat out and only just able to complete 1-minute at this level.

The Workout

This should take 20 minutes to complete.

You're basically performing a warmup followed by 4 'cycles' of intensity ending at a peak before a final minute of cooldown.

So how do you adjust the Effort Level? Well, this is a combination of the incline setting and the speed. The first few times you do this workout, you'll be going through a process lf 'trial-and-error' to find out what works for you. For some, you'll stick to a standard incline throughout and simply increase & decrease the treadmill speed. For others, you may find that you keep at a steady pace but adjust the incline. And finally, for the more experienced fitness enthusiast, you'll probably need to adjust both.

That's the benefit of the 'Effort Level' approach – it is relative to how you perceive the effort level.

If you have time, you can really crank up the fat burning effects of this workout by continuing with a further 15-20 minutes of mild cardio after you've finished this High Intensity session.

OK, so here is the workout, minute-by-minute: