How to HIIT Your Fitness Peak Faster Than You Can Imagine
This is going to be your year. This year, you will whip your body into shape within the next few months. But how? Is it really possible to achieve real fitness in just a few months?
You don’t have enough free time to spend hours a week on cardio, and it doesn’t seem to work for you any more anyway. You’re certainly not going to hire a personal trainer and spend hours a day at the gym. There’s got to be some way to get get yourself in great shape without giving up on having a life. Well you’re in luck. There is a way to do all of the above. It’s a workout approach called HIIT.
What in the World is HIIT?
HIIT is an acronym that stands for High-Intensity Interval Training. A HIIT workout calls for cycles of short, high-intensity exercises, followed by short low-intensity recovery periods. When you do a HIIT workout, your heart rate is always changing, rocketing up and down like a roller coaster, from a relatively low level to near your maximum, then back down again. As you can probably imagine, HIIT workouts are tough, but fortunately, they’re short.
Typically, a workout entails a short warm up, several cycles of high-intensity work, followed by several minutes of cooling down. The whole workout will usually take 45 minutes or so and shouldn’t be repeated more than 3 times a week. This kind of schedule gives your muscles adequate time to recover between workouts.
How does the HIIT approach compare to more traditional approaches that feature great activities like jogging for hours, swimming endless laps, and heavy dieting. Short intense HIIT workouts look pretty enticing compared to all that and are more likely to fit into your busy life.
But does High-Intensity Interval Training work?
Scientists show conclusively that the continually varying heart rates and exercise levels associated with high-intensity interval training are very effective for burning fat while maintaining or even adding to your muscle mass. This is true even though HIIT workouts are shorter than traditional workout programs and even though your body is most efficient at burning fat during long slow aerobic workouts like jogging. The reason for this surprising result is that HIIT workouts cause your metabolic rate to stay higher during the times between workouts as your system recovers from the intensity of the workouts.
What’s it like to do high-intensity interval training?
Are you curious as to what a HIIT workout is like?. Well, they vary depending on the design of the particular program, but they have a lot of common elements to them. In particular, they usually involve multi-joint movements.
Multi-joint movements are exercises like deadlifts, which call into play multiple muscle groups. These exercises are fundamentally different than exercises like curls, which involve a single muscle group. Involving more than one muscle groups help you to move more weight in each repetition thereby making it possible to get more work done in less time.
Perhaps the prototypical HIIT workout is sprinting. The way a sprinter trains, with frequent short bursts of all-out movement followed by rest periods is high-intensity interval training in its purest form. And if you’ve ever looked at the physiques on sprinters, you know what this kind of training program can do .
As time goes on, more experts are beginning to recognize that HIIT is the best way to get in shape, tone your body, strengthen your heart, and burn fat. If you want to be fit and lean by summer, with a flat belly, solid muscles, and a healthy heart, try a HIIT workout program.
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