SHE works me hard, the new personal trainer. She simply ignores it when I grumble, knowing full well that I'm just, well, grumbling, and she doesn't let me get away with anything ("I know you can do it! Five more!" and so on). This is intensely annoying, mainly because she's right.
If I thought hell was five more repetitions however, I hadn't even a dipped my toe into Dante's second circle. Because a few weeks ago the trainer introduced me to a new technique, called interval training, and I can happily say after several session
s of it that if I ever meet the person who invented it, I'll gladly push their smug, pert, perfectly toned backside off their treadmill.
The ethos behind interval training is that the body responds to short, sharp shocks of high intensity work followed by short, slower periods of low activity. It's meant to be incredibly effective at burning fat and is great for strengthening the heart and cardiovascular system and increasing your oxygen intake.
It's also bloody exhausting.
Interval training is most commonly used by professional athletes, particularly runners. They will do bouts of peak performance running, perhaps up to 1km, and then have recovery periods of slower jogging. As it's unlikely I'll ever forge a career as a short distance OIympian it may seem an odd choice for my trainer to make, but then what else would she do with her time if she wasn't dreaming up new ways to torture me?
She introduced the method by stealth. I'd already done 15 minutes on the treadmill and ten on the Life Cycle so when, after some work with weights, she asked me to hop back on to the cycle, I thought perhaps she was going senile. But no, she wanted me to do "two very fast, very intense minutes", keeping my speed up as high as possible.
I was well warmed up, but it was still gruesome, as I pedalled for all my life was worth (it was on one of those horrid slow settings as well, where you feel like you're cycling through warm mud) watching the LED display for the magic "minutes: 2:00" to appear.
Immediately she had me hop off and do two minutes of sloooow but intense weight work. Then she had me hop back on and do two more minutes on the cycle. After ten minutes of this I felt as if I'd just attempted a half marathon with Paula Radcliffe.
I've adjusted to interval training a little. I've grown used to the intense spurts, and the effects on the body, although I'm not sure I could ever say I actively enjoy it. After all, there's always those five more repetitions to do.
NEXT WEEK: A question of flexibility
The full article contains 470 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
