I Tried The Victoria’s Secret Treadmill Challenge For A Month And This Is What Happened

For the past month, I spent five days a week incorporating this treadmill workout created by a Victoria's Secret Angel trainer to prepare the models for the big show. Even Taylor Swift reportedly used this method to prepare for the big event. I limited my other workouts to isolate the results produced from this specific workout more accurately. Here's my review and experience of this 30 to 40-minute walking workout, which oscillates between various inclines and speeds minute by minute. 

The Workout: What It's Like

You can find a detailed description of the exact workout used by some of the most aspirational models here. You will need access to a treadmill for this workout, so it's not the most accessible equipment-wise if you don't have a gym membership or own a treadmill, but for those of you who do, it's a great way to incorporate versatility into your exercise routine. 

I gravely underestimated this workout plan before I started. Looking at the prescriptive speeds and inclines, I audaciously uttered, "This is going to be so easy." Boy, was I humbled. Perhaps it's because my short legs on my under 5'2" frame take a little extra work to reach the same feats as those long-legged runway models, but at peak speeds, I was doing more of a half run-half speed walk for my life, lest I flew right off the conveyor belt. 

The Beginning

The first session was brutal. I expected to barely break a sweat, but by the end of a nearly 40-minute brisk walking interval session, my calves felt like tight cinder blocks, and I was "perspiring from the irony" as I listened to Cute Is What We Aim For's “The Curse of Curves.” After indulging in a much-earned stretch, my first thought was to jot down the notes "underestimated" and "mistakes were made." After taking the next day off, it was back to the grind. I was not about to get mogged by a treadmill. I would have to conquer the art of speed walking on an incline while short. 

My next session was still challenging but more manageable. I knew what to expect. I had looked into the belly of the beast, and all there was left to do was slay the dragon. Pro tip: If you have shorter legs and find that the speed at the higher inclines is too difficult to maintain, first try using your arms in a swinging motion to propel you forward, much like a grandma power walking through the mall. 

If this is still too challenging, lower the speed by 0.1 until you don't fear meeting your maker via a treadmill incident. Over time, it becomes easier – easier, not easy. It teeters between low-impact (it is walking, after all) and strenuous activity when you're speed walking up what feels like a mountain. After these workouts, I always felt refreshed, even if I had been loathing getting on the treadmill and desperately wanted to skip it. 

After One Week

After getting through the first week, this routine felt like a breeze compared to the first day my calves were on fire. I looked forward to my time on the treadmill, eagerly anticipating the hardest crescendo of the workout plan and the inevitable relief that came once it was done. With each session, I improved my muscular endurance, felt less sore, and didn't require as much stretching.

By the End of the Month

After doing this for five days a week over four weeks, I can confidently say it was an enjoyable experiment that made marginal improvements in my fitness. Anecdotally, I was struggling to keep up when I first started, but by the end of this experiment, I felt like I could just keep going if I wanted to. 

However, I was starting to suffer from workout fatigue, not necessarily physically but mentally. It took a lot of focus to jostle around with the different treadmill buttons, all timed at specific minutes. For this reason, I think this workout best fits in a comprehensive exercise routine that incorporates other types of training, like bodyweight exercises, resistance bands, weight lifting, or high-intensity cardio – anything to mix it up.

Did I Lose Any Weight?

This workout elevates your heart rate, boosting your energy and burning calories, but it's not such a high intensity that you get ravenously hungry afterward and end up eating back all of your calories. That's the dreaded loop I find myself in when I get sucked back into running – an activity I love but which I find counterintuitive to weight loss or even weight maintenance, personally. I wasn't attempting to lose weight during this challenge so I wasn't in a calorie deficit. I found this workout to be an excellent form of exercise for weight maintenance, and the increased activity allowed me to even raise my calories slightly. 

Certainly, if you were to incorporate this workout into your schedule five times a week when you're usually a couch potato, you would likely shed some pounds unless you were eating a copious amount of food. This is because you would be drastically increasing your energy output. Whether or not you lose weight from this workout has everything to do with whether or not you're setting yourself up for success. You need to be in a caloric deficit to lose weight, meaning you consume fewer calories than you're burning. 

How do you know how many calories your body needs? This information is easily accessible through an online calorie calculator tool. Find out what your maintenance calories are based on your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE). Then, you choose whether to decrease calorie consumption via diet or burn more calories via exercise. For someone of my petite height, I find a combination of both is optimal to avoid ultra low calorie diets. If you need to go below 1200 calories to lose weight, it's time to incorporate exercise instead. You can achieve weight loss in a variety of ways, but you should always do it in a way that's most enjoyable and the least difficult for you. I found this routine to give me the perfect dose of physical activity.

"Why wouldn't I just go for a regular walk?" Go for it! However, walking on flat ground primarily targets your lower body muscles, while including incline training can benefit your endurance and muscle-building by generating more muscle activity since you're working against gravity. By adjusting the incline repeatedly, you target several different muscle groups in your legs, such as your calves, quads, and glutes. A lot of people are tempted to run to burn extra calories in a shorter period. However, running spikes cortisol and hunger hormones, which can sabotage your diet. Incline walking is a happy medium that increases metabolic cost (calories burned) by 52% at a 5% incline and up to 110% on a 10% incline.

What I Liked and Didn't Like

This workout is fun, challenging, and engaging. If you're someone like me who needs to feel like you really "worked" during your exercise or it "doesn't count" (in a self-satisfactory way, not a disordered way), then this is the best low-impact option you could opt for. You're constantly changing the incline and speed every one to two minutes, which forces you to be present. It's a small time commitment, too. I time my workouts and found that I usually finished in about 38 minutes, including the warm-up and cool-down. 

It can be daunting to hype yourself up to make a weightlifting PR, but when your gym session encompasses merely hopping on the treadmill and making it happen, you're seldom overcome by such palpable gym blues. Feeling super stressed or bothered by anything? This workout will take your mind off it, almost like a meditation. The emphasis on focusing on the various intervals as they came was sometimes a rewarding retreat from the chaos inside my brain.

However, constant toggling with treadmill speeds and monitoring the time so I knew when to switch increments started to become a nuisance, especially if you like to consume entertainment in the form of YouTube videos while you walk (good luck). It doesn't enable you to enjoy a passive workout, absorbed by distracting entertainment. 

Instead, you'll find that you can hardly even enjoy your music because you're perpetually counting, playing with buttons, or getting frustrated that you were supposed to move to the next interval two minutes ago, but you forgot. For some people, the peak speed at the designated incline may be a little too fast, and they will need to adjust accordingly. If you are a very sedentary person, you likely would have to start at fewer than five days a week and build up to this, as my calves were very sore when I first started.

Closing Thoughts

Overall, if you have access to a treadmill, it's an excellent exercise routine to add to your repertoire for some diversity of workouts. If you'd like to incorporate more cardio into your routine but hate cardio, this could be an option that keeps you on your toes. I can definitely feel it working my leg muscles, and in combination with some resistance exercises, this would be a powerful, well-rounded fitness routine to get in shape. 

Those who like a more simple, passive workout that enables you to get lost in your music or an entertaining video would likely prefer something like 12-3-30 over this. However, I highly recommend you try out this deceptively strenuous treadmill routine for yourself! It certainly keeps your body and mind guessing for about 40 minutes a day, leaving you in a puddle of sweat and feeling a little more like a Victoria's Secret Angel.

Support our cause and help women reclaim their femininity by subscribing today.