Starting a Sprinting Routine on a Treadmill

Steady-state cardio exercise has it's benefits, but if you want to kick your metabolism into overdrive and burn a serious number of calories, consider adding sprint intervals to your treadmill routine. Sprinting is a high-intensity exercise designed to jack up your heart rate, and while you may not be able to sprint full speed on a treadmill, you can approximate some quality sprint intervals by programming the machine at the start of your workout.

  1. Benefits

    • In addition to sharing many of the same cardiovascular benefits as traditional jogging routines, sprinting raises your heart rate and forces your body to work much harder. Because of this, you'll burn more calories sprinting on a treadmill than you will jogging. Since it's so intense, your muscles will not atrophy from sprint training, which is a common side effect of jogging.

    Treadmill Functions

    • Before you hop on the treadmill and set it to maximum speed for a sprint, familiarize yourself with the machine and explore the many preprogramming options modern treadmills come equipped with. You won't be able to keep up a dead sprint for long, so you need to alternate between periods of high and low intensity throughout your run. Instead of doing this manually, you can program your treadmill to accelerate or decelerate at various intervals.

    Intervals

    • When it comes time to plan out what sort of intervals you'll do, you want to start slowly and work your way up in terms of intensity. The National Council on Strength and Fitness recommends that beginners start with a work-to-rest ratio of one to three. If you sprint for 30 seconds, you want to walk or jog lightly for the next minute and a half. Ideally, you should improve to a maximum work-to-rest ratio of one to five for sprint workouts.

    Considerations

    • Although sprinting has loads of benefits, it's high-intensity nature makes it much harder on the body than steady-state cardio. Warm up with a five-minute round of jogging, running in place or an alternative exercise to get your blood pumping and prepare your body for the coming exertion. Sprints recruit muscles and work them to the point of exhaustion, so you shouldn't perform sprint workouts on consecutive days to allow for proper rest and recovery. If you want to take some of the impact off your joints, consider sprinting on a stationary bike instead of a treadmill.