Donny is doing fantastic! He had a full knee replacement done yesterday…. at 33 years old. His other knee was completely shot and had him in so much pain. The procedure only took a little over an hour and by the time they let me in to see him he was wide-eyed and bushy-tailed.
Well, technically he was wide-eyed. Instead of general anesthesia, they gave him a spinal block to numb his lower half and then gave him some other good stuff so he didn’t really know what was going on. He woke up with very little nausea and feeling pretty good. Not quite bushy-tailed, but only because he couldn’t feel from mid-belly down! Hahaha it took a couple hours before he could finally get full feeling everywhere.
After the surgery the doctor told me that he would be in the hospital until Thursday afternoon as long as all his therapy goes well. He will do therapy a couple times today and tomorrow morning. Wish him luck! He will be a whole new man with this new knee…. and that much closer to being bionic!
The Workout Wednesday for today is a HIIT workout that is done on the elliptical. I know, I tried to trick you by calling it something really odd…. 30-Minute Elliptical HIIT. Woah.
I love doing high-intensity interval training because it takes a lot less time to get the benefits compared to steady-state cardio. Not familiar with HIIT? It can be done a million ways, but is basically intervals of really high-intensy exercises followed by medium to low intensity exercises. HIIT can be done in a 3:1 ratio, 2:1 or even 1:1. For example, you’d walk for 90 seconds, sprint 30 seconds (3:1 ratio). You could also walk for 60 second and sprint for 30 seconds (2:1 ratio). Keep in mind that you want the high-intensity portions to be all-out, as fast as you can go. If you cannot keep at that pace with the 1:1 ratio then back it off to 2:1 or 3:1.
I pick and choose different ratios to use but this particular workout is a 3:1 ratio, 20 seconds of all-out followed by 40 seconds of medium-low. I prefer to do my sprint on the elliptical at the :20s mark, so the first 20 seconds of the minute are medium-low, the middle 20 seconds are really fast, and the last 20 seconds are back to medium-low. Over the years I’ve found that I like this best for the 3:1 ratio, but do the all-out portion whenever you’d like.
For further detail and some other examples of workouts check out with article on Bodybuilding.com called High-Intensity Interval Training: The Ultimate Guide.
I actually do most of my cardio on the treadmill or the Cybex Arc Trainer. Occasionally I will hop on the elliptical, but the same method can be done on the Arc Trainer (or treadmill for that matter). Obviously the levels at which you perform this workout will vary depending on the machine.
The ellipticals that I use have levels varying from 1-20. I try to be in the upper half of that most of the workout (not counting warm-up & cooldown). However, the Arc Trainer actually goes from level 0-100, so I try stay between levels 40-80. The levels I choose will also vary depending on how I feel that day. If I am sluggish then I’ll back it off a little bit so that I can still go all-out during the high-intensity spurts. If I am rockin’ the workout and feeling top notch then I’ll play around with the higher levels to see how much I can take.
Another killer HIIT workout is one that I’ve done on the treadmill, Treadmill HIIT (I know, I know I’m quite creative in naming my workouts). HIIT exercise gets my heart rate up very quickly and also gets me pretty dang sweaty!
Do you incorporate high-intensity interval training into your workout routine?
Thanks for the update on Donny. I hope his therapy goes well. Heading out for the high intensity workout. I’m going to try 3:1 outside at the golf course. Thanks for the workout.
Awesome! 3:1 is probably my favorite. HIIT can also be done with plyometrics and certain weight training exercises!