Since the t4 is time-based, rather than repetition-based, you ideally need someone with a stop-watch to shout “stop” and “go” and possibly “switch to (next exercise)... you’ve only got 10 seconds”.
I work out at home, typically on my own, and I like to vary single exercise t4s (maybe rowing or elliptical trainer) with multi-exercise sets... maybe 4 different free-weight exercises in a row, then repeated to bring the total to 8. Watching the sweep hand on a clock just doesn’t work at all.
So I thought, hey, I’ll whip up a sound track with my voice saying “start” and “stop” at the beginning and end of each 20 second sprint, followed by 10 seconds of silence. That worked fine, but it was a little boring listening to myself. So, I decided to splice in 20 seconds of some high-intensity music to replace “start” and “stop”, with 10 seconds of silence in between. I even added some comic relief sound effects at the end to let me know when I was done!
Much better! I play it through my stereo speakers; although headphones would be fine, if you don't get tangled in the headphone’s wires while you’re doing your thing.
Here’s my first sample, but I’m working on more to mix it up a bit... Tabata-Curved Air (Vivaldi) 2 It starts with 10 seconds of silence to give you time to get in place to begin.
You wouldn’t use this as easy listening music, but the pace of the music is genuinely motivational in terms of keeping up the physical and aerobic intensity of each 20 second segment.
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