High Intensity Interval Training

High intensity interval training (HIIT) is a great way to both improve performance and to also lose weight quickly. HIIT is a different way of doing cardio with just a couple of rules to remember:

First, your running session should only be 15-30 minutes.

Secondly, sessions should have a 2:1 ratio in terms of time. so a session may be something as 60 seconds jog, 30 seconds sprint alternating

An example of a HIIT session may be as follows: Begin with a five minute warm up jog at about a medium intensity followed by a couple of minutes of stretching. Then start with a jog at about medium intensity for 60 seconds and then sprint hard for 30 to 60 seconds. Keep alternating this for 20 minutes or so and then at the end you can do some lower level jogging for 5 minutes as a cooldown.

This kind of workout is very difficult, especially the first few times that you try it and so it would be a good idea to only do it every second day and gauge how you are recovering from the workouts.

There have been a lot of studies on the high intensity interval training over the last few years and they seem to show that this is a very effective method for improving fitness as well as a nice change from regular running and workouts. One of the most important reasons that High intensity interval training works is because when you stress your body at the highest level you will burn a lot more fat then when running at a lower level jog.

Some proponents of HIIT say that to drop weight faster you would want to do this training on an empty stomach and I would have to agree with that. The idea is that since your body has no available calories to burn that it would replace muscle glycogen by burning fat. I would love to see more studies on this since it seems to make sense but there is not much evidence of it except for people saying that it seems to work.

Recently it has been shown that two weeks of HIIT can substantially improve insulin action in young healthy men. HIIT may therefore represent a viable method for prevention of type-2 diabetes.

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