Shaun T- Insanity: Max Interval Sports Training
Equipment needed: none
Level: Advanced
Bottom line: This workout from the Insanity Deluxe series deserves its own standalone review because it is ridiculously fun and challenging without being dreadworthy- I expect that it will be a regular fixture in my rotation.
I have a love-hate relationship with the Insanity series. When I attempted to do the full rotation last summer, I dropped it about 2/3's of the way through and never looked back (read this entry for my reasoning). While I'm up for grueling workouts quite often, I think hour-long grueling cardio sessions are a complete waste of time, so the Month 1 workouts are the only ones I would use again except in very rare circumstances. Although I have yet to do any of the regular Insanity workouts since last year, I was looking through my collection for some interesting cardio to do, and I pulled out this workout, which I had never done before.
It is an absolute blast! Yes, this workout is actually fun! I thought the structure was near ideal: it is interval-style, comprised of intense athletic drills, with the work intervals ranging between 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Unlike in the other Insanity workouts, though, the intensity ebbs and flows throughout the different drills and the rest periods are ample, allowing you to work at maximum intensity during the work intervals. It also contains a huge variety of exercises and very little repetition.
It starts off with a sensible and progressive warmup and is broken up into five sections of sports-inspired drills: boxing, football, basketball, gymnastics and track and field. I found that the hour flew by, because the variety meant I never had time to dread the next interval or get bored. Shaun T was also his usual awesome, highly motivating and inspirational self in this.
I can't believe I'm saying this about an Insanity workout, but it wasn't quite as challenging as I expected. I didn't want a workout that would make me feel like I had to puke (Pure Cardio comes to mind), but the rest intervals were long (often a minute in length), and the sequencing of the exercises (particularly the gymnastics interval in the middle) gave my heart rate a chance to come down quite a bit. Still, with this style of interval training, my average heart rate was probably what it would have been had I been doing high-impact, steady-state cardio, so I felt worked out at the end. It's definitely not a light day workout, but it's also not a balls-to-the-wall intense workout.
Overall: If you can get your hands on this, do it! It's fun- not super grueling, but I can guarantee it'll provide some high-quality sweating.