Giant sets are doing 4 or more exercises back-to-back with no break. During these sets you can either pair exercises that are non-competing, in other words opposing muscle groups, or you can target the same muscle.

For example, you might do an overhead press, a lateral raise, a rear-delt raise and an upright row for shoulders — then rest a few minutes to catch your breath and repeat.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS?

• Improve muscular endurance and cardiovascular performance
• Increase athletic performance
• Can be time efficient
• Boosts mood and mental health
• Can promote weight loss
• Good for motivation
• Effective for burning calories and building strength

Fartlek is a Swedish word and roughly translated means ‘speed play’. Fartlek training involves varying the intensity or speed of your run to improve your fitness and endurance. Fartlek sessions are usually performed for a minimum of 45 minutes and intensity can vary from walking, right up to sprinting.

A fartlek run can be as simple as picking up the pace in between a stop sign, traffic light, etc. mixing up a variety of varied speeds and efforts levels. An interval workout is a short, repeated bout of hard effort followed by a recovery period of very easy running.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS?

• It’s a great test for strength and endurance
• It improves speed and race tactics
• It improves the mind over matter game
• It improves your ability to put on a spurt in races and overtake a competitor when tired or knock seconds off your finish time
• It is great for getting into the racing mindset as a fartlek session mimics the surges of speed you may put on in a race
• Incorporating these surges of speed helps runners to gauge and learn how much they can push their body over shorter segments while at the same time keeping enough physical and mental energy in reserve to go the whole distance and complete a race
• There is a lot of flexibility within the workout
• A fartlek session can be completed alone or with another runner or in a group

A drop set is an advanced resistance training technique in which you focus on completing a set until failure — or the inability to do another repetition. Then, you lighten the load by 10–30%, and repeat, with little to no rest in between sets.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS?

• Promote muscle growth
• Build muscular endurance
• Efficient with time
• Boosts mood and mental health
• Can promote weight loss
• Good for motivation
• Good for fast-twitch muscle fibre recruitment

It’s not as complicated as you might think. Interval training is simply alternating short bursts (example 30 seconds) of intense activity with longer intervals (example 1 to 2 minutes) of less intense activity.

Whether you’re a novice exerciser or you’ve been exercising for years, interval training can help you make your workout routine more exciting. Consider the benefits.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS?

• You’ll burn more calories
• You’ll be more time efficient
• You’ll improve your aerobic capacity
• You’ll keep boredom at bay
• You don’t need necessarily need any special equipment
• Great for motivation and keeping the mind active while training