Interval training is a great, fun, and time efficient way to increase the intensity of your walking workouts. What's great about doing intervals is that you work at a higher intensity, but only in short bursts. You don't have to be able to sustain that HARDER stage of work for long periods of time. This allows you to stimulate your system for better conditioning and gradually work up to more difficult levels.

Interval training is fun because it offers variety to your program. Because interval training is more intense, you're not going to do it every day. Instead, you'll do it two to three times per week. With your other workouts, you will increase your time, distance, and frequency of your walking to keep pushing up the work load.

Lastly, interval training is efficient. For the same amount of time that you would take to walk at a steady pace, when you add in interval training, you use more energy or burn more calories. For the same amount of time, you're working HARDER. Therefore, on particularly busy days, interval training is a great way to maintain the higher state of conditioning that you've developed in the same amount of time.

Here are some sample interval training workouts:

Table 15-1: Interval Workout I–30 minutes

To increase the level of difficulty of this workout, replace each health walk with a fitness walk and replace each fitness walk with a power walk. To increase the length of the workout, add more intervals.

Table 15-2: Interval Workout II –35 minutes

To increase the level of difficulty of this workout, replace each health walk with a fitness walk, and replace each fitness walk with a power walk. To increase the length of the workout, add in more intervals.