I am beginning to wonder if I’m the only person on the planet who has actually tried the Sugarcane workout. You can read and hear about it anywhere: an Andrew Huberman podcast propelled it to internet fame, there are plenty of blogs describing the protocol, and you can’t scroll fitness TikTok very long without coming across a clip of Huberman touting it. But unlike other trendy workouts like the Norwegian 4×4 or the 12-3-30, I couldn’t find many people saying they had actually done the Sugarcane workout, much less enjoyed it or seen results. So I had to try it for myself.
What is the Sugarcane (or Sugar Kane) workout?
The Sugarcane workout is a series of intervals described by Andy Galpin (on Huberman’s podcast). He says he learned it from trainer Kenny Kane, which leads Huberman to dub it the Sugarcane (Sugar Kane?) workout. Here is the clip in which Galpin originally describes the workout.
The Sugarcane workout is sometimes described as a HIIT workout or a VO2max workout, but Galpin doesn’t use either term. It is an interval workout, though, with short segments that you do at high intensity, with rests in between.
Galpin says that it can be done with any length of interval, but only walks through an example of how to do it with two-minute intervals. This workout doesn’t seem to have been published elsewhere, so all we really have to go on is this short interview clip. Here’s how he describes it in the podcast:
Round 1: run (or bike, row, etc.) as far as you can in two minutes. Note the distance you covered.
Rest two minutes
Round 2: run (or bike, row, etc.) for the same distance as round 1. Expect this to take slightly longer than round 1.
Rest two minutes
Round 3: run (or bike, row, etc.) for the same time as round 2. Aim to beat your original distance from round 1.
So if you covered 400 meters (one lap of a track) in round 1, you might take 2:05 to cover that same distance in round 2. You’ll then need to run for 2:05 in the third round, aiming to cover 401 meters or more.
How it went when I tried it
I chose to do this on foot, running on a flat gravel track. Should be pretty simple, right? Just a nice little evening of running intervals. Welp, I ran into a few problems.
No easy way to program it in an app or watch
My first problem was that there was no easy way to program the workout on my phone or watch. In the Garmin Connect app, I can create time-based or distance-based intervals, so the first two-minute round is easy enough. But I can’t program the second interval as distance-based when I don’t know the distance ahead of time. And I can’t program the third interval as time-based, either, since I don’t know the time ahead of time!
This is a workout that might actually be easier on a 1980s-style wristwatch, but no matter how you do it, you’ll need to take note of the time and distance for each interval as you do it—for example, hitting your watch’s lap button while also noting exactly which tree you’re running past. I’m not confident I’d have that many brain cells available at the end of a hard effort, but I’m sure someone has managed to do it.
So I programmed it into the Garmin anyway. I set the first interval as 2 minutes, each recovery as 2 minutes, and the other two work intervals as “until lap button press.” I also created a data screen that could show me the previous lap time and distance next to the current lap time and distance. I’m all set. Let’s go!
It’s a lot of fuss for three very similar intervals
It occurred to me that it would be very possible to sandbag this workout and fail to get the intended stimulus. Galpin says that “if you slack, you make the next round harder,” but that doesn’t seem to be the case—more about that below. I decided I was not going to slack. I would do my best to run each interval at a near-maximal effort. Here are my splits:
Round 1, two minutes: 0.27 miles
Round 2, 0.27 miles: 2:06 minutes
Round 3, 2:06: …I’m not exactly sure. I tried to stop my watch at 2:06 but actually stopped it at 2:07. I did make the 0.27 mile target, though. That’s about 434 meters.
I give myself an A+ on pacing. For comparison, Galpin said in his example that if you get 400 meters in round 1, you might cover the same 400 meters in 2:05 or 2:10, and that in the third round you would try to aim for 405 or 410. My watch doesn’t distinguish 5- or 10-meter increments, so I did about the best I could under the circumstances.
For Christ’s sake, just do normal intervals
I finished this workout wondering, what was the point? I could get pretty much the identical stimulus from a traditional runner’s workout of time-based or distance-based intervals with a target pace or target heart rate.
For example, I could have given myself “3×400 @ interval pace,” where “interval pace” means a pace that feels hard for that distance but still allows me to run all of my intervals in about the same time. Not only do runners do this all the time (no need to reinvent the wheel), you can even use a vdot calculator like this one to tell you exactly what pace to aim for. I plugged in a recent race time, and the calculator gave me a target of 2:04 for 400-meter intervals. That’s almost exactly the same as my average pace over the three Sugarcane intervals. Why didn’t I just do that?
Another way to do intervals is to make them time-based. Two minutes hard, two minutes recovery, repeat. If you’re using a running watch, you can choose a target pace here as well. In my case, my two-minute interval pace will be almost identical to my 400-meter pace. If you are a faster or slower runner, it will be a bit different for you, but you can either do some math to decide on a target, or just go by effort or heart rate. My heart rate averaged almost exactly 85% of max on those intervals, if that gives you a sense of what to aim for.
This normal approach also teaches you to practice pacing: instead of crashing and burning on the first interval because you’re trying to go out at “max effort” (and then being a lot slower on later intervals), you run the first interval knowing that you’ll have to match it three or four or seven more times on only two minutes’ rest.
How do you progress the Sugarcane workout?
Here’s a point of confusion. In the interview, after the Sugarcane workout is described and named, Huberman asks Galpin how to progress the workouts he’s been talking about. Galpin describes adding more work or additional rounds, but his answer is pretty clearly not applicable to the Sugarcane workout. He talks about published research (the Sugarcane workout has not been formally researched, as far as I could find) and talks about using a 2:1 rest-to-work ratio (the Sugarcane workout as described uses a 1:1 ratio).
The Sugarcane workout is described as a one-off, a fun little game you can play with yourself when you’re doing a workout. It’s not a workout that’s backed by research or that you’re supposed to do a certain number of times per week (like, say, the Norwegian 4×4). It doesn’t have a built-in progression scheme. It also seems to fall apart pretty easily if you don’t push yourself on each round.
On the other hand, if you do regular runners’ intervals (400s, or 600s, or two-minute intervals), it’s easy to progress them. Just add a round each time you do the workout, until you’re doing about 8 at a time. At that point you may want to switch to a different workout (say, 800s instead of 400s, or hill repeats instead of track intervals) depending on your training goals.
How often should I do the Sugarcane workout?
Galpin doesn’t say. Huberman suggests doing it once every two to four weeks because it’s so intense. That doesn’t make a lot of sense—three two-minute intervals, even if you run the first one all-out, won’t take you multiple weeks to recover from.
In more traditional running or cardio programming, you would do intervals like these once or twice a week, but not always the same workout each time. For example, you might have a hard workout day every Wednesday, and alternate between track intervals, tempo runs, and hill repeats.
If you really want to do the Sugarcane workout—and I think you should, if only because I did it and misery loves company—you could do it once a week. Or, better yet, once in your life and then move on to normal intervals.
How does the Sugarcane workout make sure you work hard?
That’s the thing. It doesn’t, really. Galpin says that if you slack off on any round, you’ll make the next round harder—but I don’t see how that’s the case unless you are trying to run your hardest each time, in which case you’re not slacking off at all. For example, after covering 400 meters in round 1, you could simply walk 400 meters for round 2. Maybe that takes you five minutes. Then in round three you’d just have to walk a smidge faster to be able to cover 401 meters in five minutes. That’s not three hard intervals, that’s one hard interval and two leisurely strolls.
Again, regular intervals would work better for this. Give yourself three two-minute rounds of “run as hard as you can while leaving enough in the tank to do it again” and you’ve removed any rules that reward you for sandbagging.
I think the thing that bugs me most about this workout is that it assumes you need to gamify a workout to push yourself, but the rules of the game don’t require you to push yourself. The only thing keeping you honest is your desire to run three hard intervals, in which case you should just run three hard intervals.