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.

Speed up your HIIT treadmill workout, raise the incline, or mix both for a challenging session, targeting 85-90% of your max heart rate (220 minus your age).

For example, at 25 years old, aim for a heart rate between 166 and 176 during HIIT.

HIIT treadmill runs, with their intense intervals, outperform steady-paced runs in burning calories and fat loss.

Regardless of fitness level, tailor your HIIT treadmill workouts to avoid burnout, starting easy and gradually ramping up intensity if you're new to HIIT.

In this HIIT treadmill workout I guide my clients through, we do one-minute sprints. It's an excellent workout for boosting muscle strength, improving stride frequency, and enhancing anaerobic endurance.

I advise to find solid speed – a pace you can maintain steadily for 25 to 30 minutes – and then aim to match or exceed this speed by 2mph during sprints.

Research indicates that a muscle-mind connection, where you consciously feel the muscle throughout its motion, boosts muscle activity.

One study by the National Institute of Health (NIH), found focusing on muscle activation during a bench press can increase triceps and upper chest activity by up to 60% [1].

Thus, engaging your mind is key to maximizing your HIIT treadmill workout, helping you adapt to varying speeds and inclines.

In my experience as a personal trainer, I've found that this low-speed, walking-only HIIT workout, though it appears easy, can actually be quite challenging.

It effectively targets the glutes, increases heart rate, and improves balance.

When guiding clients through lateral walking, I recommend lightly touching the rails for balance but advise against leaning on them.

I instruct them to point their feet sideways, not forward, and to shuffle or cross their feet at a pace that feels comfortable.

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.

In my training sessions, I often make the treadmill workouts more challenging by adding an incline.

I tell my clients that they don't need to sprint, but the incline itself will make their bodies and hearts work harder, activate their leg muscles more, and boost their 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

I encourage clients to make their treadmill workouts more enjoyable by interspersing them with full-body strength exercises.

Alternating between running and strength training keeps the heart engaged throughout the workout.

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

Try this intense Tabata HIIT treadmill workout, pushing you to your limits.

Tabata, tougher than most HIIT routines, boosts your heart rate into anaerobic zones, working all energy systems.

It involves 20 seconds of high-intensity exercise, followed by 10 seconds rest, repeated eight times over four minutes.