Everyone must want to be healthy. One of the ways of being healthy is doing regular exercises. Exercise is good for our body, as it can maintain the body muscles, burn excessive calories, and maintain our postures as well. You can also read the health benefits of Kegel exercise for women. Another example of the exercises you can do is tabata.
Tabata is a high-intensity interval training, known as HIIT, a cardiovascular workout. This workout elevates the heart rate and burns a lot of calories in a short amount of time. That’s why many people favor this exercise to lose weight. Tabata was developed in 19976 by a researcher named Dr. Izumi Tabata, who was studying the effectiveness of traditional workout methods and HIIT tasks.
There are 5 main types of tabata exercise. They include:
- Lunges – targets the back, abdominal muscles, glutes, hamstrings, quads, and calves. Read more about the health benefits of squats and lunges for every day.
- Burpees – is a full-body move which targets your arms, chest, shoulders, legs, hips, quads, glutes, and abs.
- Push ups – a properly-executed push up focuses on your core, together with the shoulders, chest, and triceps. Get to know more about the health benefits of push ups and sit ups everyday.
- Jump squats – focuses on your form and ensures that your glutes, hamstrings, hips, and quads get a solid workout.
- Skaters – focuses mostly on the quads and glutes, but you may also feel the burn on your legs and associated muscles.
Tabata is not only effective in burning calories, but there are also some more health benefits you need to know. Here they are the 5 health benefits of tabata exercise.
1. It Improves Your Overall Health
Dr. Izumi Tabata, who developed this form of exercise, found that tabata exercise is capable to improve a person’s aerobic and anaerobic systems, which are the body’s energy-producing systems.
2. It is a Great Cardio Workout
While you’re doing tabata, you’re pushing your body so hard and doing cardio as well. As a result, you’re burning fat. Because you’re not catching your breath completely in that ten-second rest period, your heart rate will be elevated and cause your body to consume fat cells as energy. This what makes tabata exercise a great cardio workout. You may also build muscle in the process.
3. It’s a Short Workout
Some people might have little time to spare for doing exercise as they are too busy with daily activities. You can spend around 4 minutes at a time, as tabata cycles require, can be a convenient amount of time for most people to schedule it into their daily routine.
You can also try Zumba if you wish to have longer type of workout. Health benefits of Zumba 3 times a week will give you the idea on how this workout works. It is good for shaping your body as well.
4. It is Flexible
Tabata exercise is flexible. It can be as simple as doing jumping jacks, kettlebells, dumbbell swings and mountain climbers.
After knowing those health benefits, there are some things you need to consider about tabata workouts. Though it is known to have effective health benefits as mentioned above, the expected results from one person may be different from the other.
- Weight loss is not guaranteed – though tabata workouts burn more calories, it does not guarantee that you could lose weight. You may necessarily burn a lot of calories in the short amount of time, however, your body is using up fat cells as energy instead of burning calories. However, tabata is considered as one of the best exercise for weight loss.
- Tabata is intense – when you’re doing tabata, you have to push yourself as hard as possible for 20 seconds at a time. Referring to the design, you won’t be able to recover fully in each 10-second rest period, so you will be challenged the entire four-minute cycle. Make sure your body is fit.
- Know your body well – understand that if you’re a newbie to do tabata workout, then you may get injury. Even for people who work out all the time understand that once they push themselves too far\ and need to take a rest. Don’t push yourself too hard and rest when you are tired.
Please note that you need to know yourself before doing tabata workout. Instead of getting those benefits, you may get injured instead if you push yourself too hard. It is also important to warm up and stretch before any workout to prevent any injuries.