Fartlek #1- 40 minutes in duration
2 minutes – walk 15 seconds, jog 45 seconds
3 minutes – walk 15 seconds, stride 45 seconds
15 minutes – walk 45 seconds, sprint 15 seconds
2 minutes – walk 15 seconds, jog 45 seconds
3 minutes – walk 15 seconds, stride 45 seconds
10 minutes – walk 40 seconds, sprint 20 seconds
5 minutes - jog
I've been running this for two days now, and I thought I'd ask, how effective are these at dropping body fat? Increasing endurance? Increasing speed?
I don't know if it'd be beneficial to run this five days a week, and then after about two weeks, step it up again.
Also, how approximately how long would it take to begin to see a significant improvement?
I believe this is the one from the University of Michigan's program? Am I correct? if so, yes it will help, but only to an extent. you must move on to more difficult and different varieties of training eventually.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's the one from Michigan. I just picked it up from browsing around, and tried it out. Just doing this routine leaves me gasping for breath at the end, so whenever I'm able to take this easily, it should be time to crank up the intensity.
If you can do this without getting tired you've probably done it a bit much. Doing the exact same procedure acclimates your body to the exercise, which means that you're no longer benefiting your cardiovascular or anaerobic pathways (their progress will plateau, eventually). Make sure you either A) move on in the training program- finish other track workouts and also, later on, the more taxing fartleks (II and III), or B) modify the workout like Wanderer suggested.
To answer your original questions...
This exercise is aimed at increasing speed endurance, the amount of time you can run at full speed, recover, and do it all over again. Fat burning will also occur naturally. An increase in top speed might occur as well, but will not show significantly.
Doing this five days a week would be more harm than good. I discussed this above, but you must also remember to rest and perform the other exercises. It'd be useless if you could sprint for however long because of this specific workout, but be unable to change direction or hold off defenders well enough to be useful in other ways.
The improvements will come in time, just don't expect anything major if all you did was this twice, or for three days. If you're judging 'improvements' in terms of an actual soccer match, you'll have to do weeks of weight training, plyometric exercises, fartlek, interval, and long distance work to see all around improvement.
