Quick Sprints Bring Lasting Benefits

What’s a Sprint?
A sprint is a short, fast run, that lasts less than a minute. Think Olympics — bring your knees high and kick back to your butt, and speed up as fast as you can go. Incor­po­rate sprints with enough rest to be fully recov­ered for at least one work­out a week.

1. Big Time Fat Burn
Some stud­ies show that sprint work­outs burn fat 9 times faster than slow car­dio, even when incor­po­rated with easy active rest sets, or short bouts of sprint­ing, fol­lowed by walk­ing to recover. One look at Olympic sprint­ers and you’ll see the chis­eled, low-body fat physique that is achiev­able with sprint inter­val work­outs. Sprint work­outs also raise your metab­o­lism, result­ing in fat burn when you’re at rest as well.

2. Car­dio Health
Your car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem — espe­cially your heart — reaps big ben­e­fits from sprint­ing. Long, slow car­dio can cause unnec­es­sary stress on your heart, where bursts of max­i­mum car­dio out­put keep your heart work­ing for less time. That increases your endurance and enables you to make even your longest sets more manageable.

3. Less Time Invested
You’ll burn as many (or more) calo­ries, while dig­ging into your fat stores with shorter car­dio ses­sions when you add in sprints. Your time is valu­able, so get on with it and dump those long, bor­ing ses­sions. Add sprints to your out­door runs as well by sprint­ing for a spec­i­fied dis­tance (one block, between two light posts, or for a length of time) and get your work­out done in 15–20 minutes.

4. Quick Results
Pow­er­ing through sprint work­outs pro­duce more sig­nif­i­cant results quicker than the months it would take you to do the same if you are dron­ing through your car­dio. Because sprints, com­bined with active rest like walk­ing, acti­vate both fast and slow twitch mus­cle fibers, ton­ing hap­pens quickly. Your higher metab­o­lism helps crank up the burn while you’re out of the gym as well.

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