8 Best HIIT Treadmill Workouts for Your Cardio Routine

High-intensity interval training is alternating exercises of quick and intense workouts followed by less-intense exercises or short rests.

You can do a HIIT treadmill workout faster or with a higher incline or a combination of the two.

When doing treadmill HIIT workouts, you're working at 85-90% of your maximum heart rate, which means it's a pretty challenging type of workout.

Try to calculate your max heart rate by subtracting your age from 220. If you're 25, then your max heart rate is 195.

You’ll do one-minute sprints for this HIIT treadmill workout.

It’s a great HIIT workout to increase muscle strength, improve your stride frequency (the number of steps you take in a minute), and boost your anaerobic endurance.

Try to determine your solid speed, the speed you can maintain in a steady state, or the pace you can maintain for 25 to 30 minutes.

Then, match or increase your solid speed to 2mph faster.

Several studies show that muscle-mind connection, consciously feeling the muscle work through the full range of motion, is important for increasing muscle activity.

One study shows that individuals can increase triceps or upper chest muscle activity up to 60% during a bench press when they focus on activating the muscles [1].

So, it's crucial to get your mind engaged in making the most of your HIIT treadmill workout.

Here's one to keep your mind on the task and help your body adapt to the changing speeds and inclines.

Though lower speeds may seem easy to do, this walking-only HIIT training could surprisingly take effort to perform.

This lateral-walking workout engages your glutes, raises your heart rate, and improves your balance.

When walking sideways or laterally, you may try to touch the rails lightly to keep your balance but do not support using your arms.

Keep your feet pointed on the side of the treadmill and not forward. You may also try to shuffle your feet and apart or cross one foot over the other while keeping an easy pace.

If you’re a beginner on treadmill workouts, here’s a great running workout for you.

This treadmill workout has tons of intervals that allow more room for improvement while also building endurance.

RPE means the rate of perceived exertion.

You can find it indicated in your treadmill, and it is a zero to ten scale of the intensity of your workout.

Make your treadmill game a lot more challenging by using an incline.

You don’t have to sprint here, but the incline alone will make your body and heart work harder, help activate your leg muscles, and increase your aerobic capacity.

If you only have 20 minutes to spare twice or thrice a week, here's a HIIT treadmill exercise you can get started. This will help increase your cardio endurance and help you burn calories.

You can adjust the speeds based on your heart rate and experience level.

• Warm-up walk at 3.0  mph: 1-2 minutes
• Fast jog at 7.0 to 9.0 mph: 30 seconds
• Walk slowly at 3.0 mph: 1 minute
• Alternate between these intervals for 20 minutes
• Cooldown (walk at 3.0 mph): 2 minutes

Make your treadmill workout more fun by mixing it up with full-body strength workouts between your running sessions.

Exercising on and off the treadmill keeps your heart working while you're performing some strength exercises.

It provides you cardiovascular benefits, plus it works your other muscles such as your arms and core.

• Warm-up (Walk or jog at a comfortable space): 5 to 10 minutes
• Run at fast speed: 60 seconds

Here’s a challenging HIIT treadmill workout that will make you work at your all-out-effort called Tabata training.

Tabata training is more intense than other HIIT exercises and aims to work all your energy systems by getting your heart rate up in the very challenging anaerobic zones.

You’ll have to do 20 seconds of an intense exercise followed by a very short recovery period of 10 seconds, and this cycle is repeated eight times in a total of four minutes.