Lots of talk about Tabata lately because it’s the latest fad to come through Taiwan. Next week there will be another fad to distract you from the fact that all the other fads – mermaid line, thigh gap, bikini gap, slideboard, ViPr, etc. – didn’t get you fitness results. What happened to the “armor line”? Unfortunately, that’s all there really is here in Taiwan, fitness fads. But some of us are fighting back. I was glad to see the article this weekend by a trainer named Coach Hank that called the Tabata trend out.
Our gym Formosa Fitness was founded on high intensity interval training (HIIT) through the kettlebell. I used to personally teach up to four group classes and 10 private sessions a day based on HIIT so I have lots of experience with it. Tabata is one version of HIIT.
The first thing you should know is that Dr. Tabata was looking for a way to increase the VO2 max of the Japanese Olympic speed skating team. Think of VO2 max as your ability to quickly exchange a high volume of carbon dioxide for oxygen in your lungs. It’s basically a measure of cardiovascular power and the Tabata protocol did increase that ability but that’s all it did. The Tabata protocol is NOT a fat loss program, a muscle-building program, a strength-building program or anything else. Don’t care about building your VO2 max? Then why are you wasting your time with Tabata?
Olympic level athletes spend more than a decade training intensely for their sport. Have you trained intensely for a decade? A year? A week? Then why are you wasting your time with this? The athletes got results with the method because they had already gone through a ton of regular strength and conditioning training. Their power output was off the charts already. Tabata found that only an all out effort produced the results he was looking for but it takes a highly conditioned body to produce that level of effort. He also found that the exercises which produced this effect are few. Only a few exercises were simple enough and stressed the body through whole body fatigue enough to be effective. Battling ropes and crappy burpees with a sagging core were not used. Tabata used an exercise bike, period. Nothing else was used to my knowledge. Chair dips that only use a single joint were certainly not used and you aren’t being told that.
Tabata is a trend now because fake trainers and Facebook pseudo fitness celebrities are using it to pander to the public because most people hate exercise and they will swallow any gimmick designed to get them to do less work. Three months ago it was the 7:00 workout and that must have worked so well that we needed to immediately replace it with a 4:00 workout. The :30 workout is just around the corner, I’m sure.
The whole point of this, just like everything else these days, is to get you to look at the trainer. It isn’t about your fitness because they don’t care about that – it’s about him or her, the fake trainer. It’s about being popular and when their stupid video with a crappy, poorly designed workout gets half a million hits, then the want-to-be celebrity can sell their popularity to a shoe company or toy fitness supplier that sells you fitness junk. They can be on TV selling “gym drinks” that you can’t actually find in any store and that have more sugar in them than protein. They can tell you that you should buy the Buttmaster 5000 even though they never used it in their lives, but you apparently should.
So are you going to fall for this fad like all of the others that didn’t work or are you ready to do some real training?