Fire up your fitness with this 30-minute super high-intensity workout for women from Fiit master trainer, Luke Baden. You’ll need access to a treadmill and a set of dumbbells.
Ready to work up a sweat? This 30-minute high-intensity workout for women is guaranteed to get your heart rate thumping and endorphins pumping! During this session, the main aim is to exercise anaerobically (that is, without oxygen), to push yourself and force your body to work in a stressful environment.
You’ll know if you’re doing it right if you feel nauseous and an almost overwhelming desire to stop! But be strong, keep digging deep and just get it done.
Benefits of high intensity workouts
There are many rewards to this type of training. This includes an increase in your anaerobic threshold, your ability to perform any vigorous exercise before needing to use the anaerobic energy system. In short, you become fitter. Training in this way can also increase your metabolism via something known as EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption). That is, when you work for sustained periods of time without oxygen, you build up something called an ‘oxygen debt’.
This debt has to be repaid, so in the time after the session (up to 48 hours post-workout), your body increases your breathing rate. An increased breathing rate means an increase in all other bodily processes, including fat burning. So put very simply: if you do the work, you’ll reap the reward!
How to do this 30-minute high-intensity workout:
Before you start this 30-minute high-intensity workout workout, prep and prime your body for the session with a warm-up. Do the following bodyweight moves, then spend a little time on the treadmill to raise your body temperature and breathing rate.
Warm up:
- Dead bugs: 30 secs
- High-plank shoulder taps: 30 secs
- Pull-throughs: 30 secs
- Knee circles: 15 secs (each side)
- Hurdle step-overs: 30 secs
- A-skips: 90 secs
- Pogo jumps: 30 secs
- Treadmill: 2 mins, then 20 secs rest
Now it’s time to work out! On the following pages you’ll find three blocks of work, during which you move between the treadmill and the mat. Follow the blocks in order, taking 45 secs rest between each.
30-minute high-intensity workout for women
BLOCK 1: Metabolic Conditioning
HOW TO DO IT: Do the following four periods of high-intensity efforts on the treadmill. Each one increases in length, so they get progressively harder. Run at the same, challenging speed for each of the efforts – around 70 per cent of your max speed.
- Run 1: 60 secs
- Rest: 20 secs
- Run 2: 70 secs
- Rest: 20 secs
- Run 3: 80 secs
- Rest: 45 secs
- Run 4: 90 secs
- Rest: 45 secs
BLOCK 2: E2MOM
HOW TO DO IT: Step off the treadmill and grab a set of dumbbells. In an E2MOM (every two minutes on the minute), your mission is to complete each of the following rounds in two minutes (six minutes in total). Any time you have left during each two-minute round can be used to rest.
- Round 1: 18 half burpees and 18 heel claps
- Round 2: 18 pull-throughs, 18 Russian twists and 18 high-plank shoulder taps
- Round 3: 18 half burpees and 18 heel claps
How to do the exercises:
HALF BURPEE
- Start standing with a relatively wide foot stance. Hinge over and bend your legs until the palms of your hands meet the floor. Now, jump your legs back into a plank position.
- Next, jump your feet forwards into a crouching position and drive your legs back to standing.
- Hop into the air and clap your hands overhead. You’ve now completed one rep, you’ll need to do 17 more. Once done, move straight to heel claps.
HEEL CLAPS
- With a tall posture and wide stance, hop into the air and clap your feet together whilst airborne.
- Make sure your feet return to the starting stance before landing so that you can chain the reps together.
PULL-THROUGHS
- Maintain a high plank position, with a single dumbbell close by.
- Start with a dumbbell on the left side of your body, reach underneath your torso with your right hand and grab the bell.
- Hold your core tight and pull the dumbbell all the way underneath you until it is on the right side of your body. That’s one rep.
- Place your right hand back to the floor, then reach for the weight with your left hand. Repeat on the other side for rep two and continue alternating.
RUSSIAN TWIST
- Sit with your knees slightly bent and heels just touching the floor, with your torso bent back. To make it slightly more challenging, sit with your legs raised a few inches off the floor.
- Hold a single medium-weight dumbbell in front of your chest with slightly bent arms.
- Twist your torso all the way to the right, allowing the bell to touch the floor on your right side. Then, twist all the way to the left, touching the dumbbell onto the floor to the left. You’ve just completed two reps, shoot for 16 more.
HIGH-PLANK SHOULDER TAPS
- Start in a high plank position. Tuck your tailbone, and squeeze your quads, glutes and abs.
- Make your body as stable as possible as you raise one hand from the floor and tap your opposite shoulder. Take care not to rock your hips whilst you do this.
- Put your hand back to the floor and repeat on the other side for rep two. Keep your core as stable as possible.
BLOCK 3: Competition Phase
HOW TO DO IT: The competition phase is where you measure your total output across three rounds. Your score for this phase will be the total number of calories you burn on the treadmill, added to the total number of reps you achieve on the floor doing each AMRAP (as many rounds as possible) while keeping your form in check.
- Round 1 – 90 secs on the treadmill at 70 per cent max pace – 15 secs to get to the floor – 75-sec AMRAP 5 front squats/5 sumo squats
- Round 2 – 90 secs on the treadmill at 70 per cent max pace – 15 secs to get to the floor – 75-sec AMRAP 5 dumbbell swings/5 American swings
- Round 3 – 90 secs on the treadmill at 75-85 per cent max pace
How to do the exercises:
FRONT SQUAT
- Hold a set of dumbbells in the front rack position with your elbows high.
- Bend at the hips, sending your bodyweight back into your heels, whilst keeping the core engaged.
- Bend your legs into a deep squat position, making sure your hip crease gets lower than your knees. Repeat.
SUMO SQUAT
- Stand tall and increase your foot stance, ensuring your feet are wider than shoulder-width apart; toes slightly turned out.
- Grab a pair of dumbbells and hold at waist height, allowing the dumbbell to hang between your legs.
- Keeping your arms fixed and your torso upright, squat down by bending at the hips and knees until your thighs are parallel to the floor.
- Keep alternating between this and the front squat move, trying to do as many reps as possible.
DUMBBELL SWING
- Stand with feet shoulder-width apart, gripping the centre of a dumbbell in each hand.
- Hinge over the hips and soften the knees (but don’t squat). The dumbbells will now travel close to the body, between the legs.
- Explosively and powerfully drive the hips forward and snap back to a standing position. The dumbbells will travel to chest level – don’t lean back, just stand tall.
- Let the dumbbells fall back down, and as they drop towards the body, hinge again, and let them travel through the legs again.
AMERICAN SWING
- Follow the same movement pattern as with the dumbbell swing, but swing the weights rapidly to the overhead position.
- Keep alternating between these two movements for the full 75 seconds, trying to do as many reps as possible.
And just like that, it’s over. What’s your score? Take note and try to beat it next time.
Luke Baden is master trainer and functional fitness programming lead at Fiit and he might just be the toughest coach you’ll ever face. His range of kettlebell, dumbbell, AirBike and Tread workouts are among the #1 rated fitness app’s most challenging, taking your training, performance and mindset to a completely new level. Fiit Tread workouts are now exclusively available on the Fiit app, with a fully connected experience also available.
Words: Luke Baden, master Fiit trainer | Model: Judine Saint Gerard, Fiit trainer | Photography: Fiit
