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Feeling Sad? Do This!
If you’ve ever experienced the blues or run of the mill sadness, you know that it can, to borrow a phrase from Friends, ruin your day, week, or even your year. Obviously, anyone who feels the blues frequently should see a doctor. But sometimes, you need an immediate injection of luscious endorphins to pull you out of a slump.
My suggestion is that you take up physical exercise. (That clicking sound you hear is everybody leaving this article because like OMG another person telling me to exercise.) I don’t mean just any physical exercise, mind you, but a specific kind of cardio called Tabata. Tabata is named after the Japanese scientist Izumi Tabata, who co-created a method for Olympic speed skaters to reach their highest potential.
The basic Tabata method is simple: Exercise at 80 to 90 percent of your maximum heart rate for 20 seconds and then rest for 10 seconds. You could also try 30 seconds of high intensity cardio followed by 15 seconds of rest. After five or six rounds of this Geneva-banned torture, rest for a minute. The most important thing, for those of you who don’t do arithmetic, is that you work twice as much as you rest. That’s what differentiates Tabata from normal HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) workouts.
How do you know what your maximum heart rate is? Just subtract your age from 220. Then calculate both 80 and 90 percent to figure…
