What Is HIIT (And What Is All The Fuss About?)
HIIT or high intensity interval training is the latest, most effective way to burn fat, lose weight and get slim in combination with a healthy diet.
The science of how and why it works is outlined in this lens, together with exactly how to take part in a HIIT workout yourself, and the results you should see but here is the most important thing you should know about HIIT:
While old-fashioned exercise programs for weight loss would enable you to burn fat for an hour or so afterwards, HIIT will allow you to continue burning fat for almost 40 hours after you stop exercising - so only 2-3 sessions a week will see your body constantly and continuously burning fat - even when you're at rest. Sound pretty exciting so far?
Well how about this for another benefit... each session only takes on average 15 - 20 minutes. Add that up - that's maybe an hours exercise per week in total for non-stop fat burning ability.
In short, it's highly effective and massively time-efficient - and that's why people are going mad for it. After all, why spend any longer exercising than is absolutely necessary? I don't know about you, but I've got other things to do!
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The Down & Dirty Guide To HIIT
Let's break it down:
High Intensity - at certain times your exercise will need to be high intensity - in other words hard. You will exercise fast and it *will* hurt to begin with.
Interval Training - you train in intervals rather than mindlessly carrying on at the same pace for hours and hours.
So pick a standard aerobic exercise - cycling, running, rowing etc. and spend 5 minutes warming up at a low intensity. Just a very gentle job for example to warm up your body and get yourself ready for what is to come.
When you've done this it's time for the meat of the exercise.
Run, cycle, swim etc. at *full pelt* - that is as fast as you humanly can - for 1 minute. At the end of the minute, slow back down to your gentle warm-up speed for a further minute. Then ramp it up again and so on.
So you're doing alternate intervals of 1 minute each, high intensity then low intensity.
Now simply do 10-15 minutes of these intervals and you're all done. Easy!
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Personally I like running best and have found it offers me personally the best bang for my buck but feel free to experiment with all of the above.
I would suggest doing each of these for a 2 week period, measuring your body fat after each period so you can see which exercise enabled you to lose the greatest amount of body fat - then carry on with just that winning exercise.
A Public Health Warning About HIIT
And that's how you're going to feel.
If you are doing HIIT at a high enough intensity for it to have all the benefits laid out on this lens then it's going to hurt.
You're going to get tired. You're going to feel rough. You're going to need real self-motivation. That 15 minutes is going to feel like an hour to begin with.
Many people report feeling or even being sick the first time as you put so much effort into it. It's normal - so don't worry if it happens to you.
In order to limit this potential downside you may like to start with 5 minutes of HIIT after your workout, then slowly build up.
Another way of doing it is doubling the low intensity interval length, or halving the high intensity interval.
Push yourself to your limit, but not past it :-)
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My own blog in which I have tried and tested HIIT more...0 points
Getting The Most Out of HIIT
Therefore, here are a few ideas you might like to incorporate from time to time (a change every 2-4 weeks seems to work well) to keep your body guessing:
1) Change the exercise you're doing - i.e. swap from running to swimming
2) Change from speed to difficulty - i.e. rather than cycling faster, change gears so it becomes harder or easier to peddle
3) Change the intervals - make them longer or short or make them so they don't match (1 minute of high intensity exercise, 30 seconds of low intensity etc.)
4) Consider including circiut training that includes some resistance training for even more challenge.
How Does HIIT Work?
They're both lean, but the sprinter manages to keep his muscle whilst the long distance runner "wastes away".
High intensity exercise allows you to burn fat whilst maintaining the muscle you already have.
In addition, research has compared the differences between the fast burning ability of high and low intensity exercises. It found that while low intensity exercise results in greater fat burning while you're exercising, the body continues to burn fat for so long after high intensity exercise that looking at the bigger picture, the high intensity interval training wins out.
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Nice lense. More info at http://www.hiitsource.com
Posted January 28, 2008
ONe more way to kill myself.. how many calories can I expect to burn on the avg HIIT workout including the extended burning affects?
Posted January 10, 2008
