One-Hour Workout: Trainer-To-Treadmill Turkey Tempo

This tough tempo brick will re-ignite your aerobic system and help find a home for all of those Thanksgiving Day calories.

Thanksgiving week is all about three things—sitting around with family, stuffing your face, and finding a way to slightly reduce the guilt that accompanies accomplishing the first two. Our best tri-advice for sitting around with family is to use a heart rate monitor to keep arguments from boiling over into ER visits. Our fall recipes cover the face-stuffing part. But most importantly, this week’s workout will help you sleep at night when visions of deep sofa cushions and endless pie servings start giving you the night sweats. Use the Trainer-To-Treadmill Turkey Tempo as a good way to jumpstart your off-season training, get the muscles moving again in a low-impact way, and help brace your body for holiday impact.

The trick to this tempo is to keep the effort sustained (don’t worry about pace). Leave the gadgets behind and only focus on feel, knowing that your fitness may not be where you want it to right now, but that you can still control your pedaling and running form within a certain range of effort. Don’t start too hard—the idea is to finish the tempos knowing you could have gone harder if you needed to.

Also, unlike in-season brick workouts, take your time on the transitions. Because your heart rate may be higher and not used to the changes, slow everything down a beat, but focus on doing everything deliberately: Put on your shoes in one good motion, make sure they’re on just right, use the time to lower your heart rate. Don’t rush from bike to run.

Since these are more casual transitions, feel free to use a spin bike and treadmill at the gym (even walk from one to the other!), a bike—sans-trainer—out on the road, or a garage-bound trainer and loops around the block.

Warm-up
10-minute easy jog
10-minute spin as: 3 minutes easy, 3 minutes 5/10 effort, 3 minutes 7/10 effort, 1 minute easy

Main Set
8 minutes bike at 4/10 effort
1 minute run at 8/10 effort
2 minutes easy walk
6 minutes bike at 5/10 effort
3 minutes run at 7/10 effort
2 minutes easy walk
4 minutes bike at 6/10 effort
5 minutes run at 6/10 effort

Cool-down
10 minutes easy bike
Stretch
Sit down
Gorge