Kettlebell tabata's

Todays' workout was excellent, just what I needed. I wasn't feeling overly motivated walking the block and a half to get there, but once I was dressed I was ready to work and found my groove! Today we did kettlebell tabata's and a quadruplet (modification of the triplet but adding one more exercise = bootstraps, burpees, mountain climbers and push-ups).

What is a tabata you ask? Well, The basis of Tabata training is 4 minutes of intense interval training/circuit training - we did 30 seconds of hard work, with 10 second rest, repeating 7 more times for a total of 8 sets.
So what you have is a total of 4 minutes workout time. This might sound easy, but trust me its not!

Tabata training can be done with a number of different exercises but the idea is to use an exercise that gets the whole body involved or at least the major muscle groups.Tabata Training can be done with barbells, dumbells, kettlebells or just bodyweight exercises. We did ours with the kettlebells - here's a video showing a tabata similar to what we did today:




The real bonus with high intensity training like tabata's (even as short as 4 minutes at a time) is that the body continues to burn calories for up to 2 days later - basically it revs up your metabolism for another 16 hours!! That's right, after doing tabata's the body continues to work hard burning all that nasty, stubborn fat even after the workout's complete. Now, that's what I'm talking about!! I might have to 'tabata-my-way' thought the whole valentines event/candy!

I was tired afterwards, but now I'm feeling good and even a little energized - I might do some ab work tonight on the TRX...we'll see! : )

Nite