Elite-level athletes have utilized it for years, but high-intensity training is gradually making its way mainstream. Sports like CrossFit—whose CrossFit Games held July 17-19 at the Home Depot Center in Los Angeles purport to determine the Fittest in The World--have helped the high intensity movement gain popularity.
In fact, IDEA Health & Fitness Association, which represents 80 countries, declared that 2010's top fitness trends can be classified into three categories: mixed martial arts (MMA), metabolic conditioning, and body leverage training (BLT)—all three incorporate high intensity intervals into their training.
Why should everyone from marathoners to weekend warriors to couch potatoes incorporate high intensity interval training (HIIT) into their routines? In workouts as short as ten to thirty minutes, a woman can burn more calories than an hour-long steady-state cardio workout, her heart rate will stay higher after the workout, burning more calories, and her blood sugar levels will stay lower, lowering her risk for diabetes, heart disease, and more.
Dr. Joseph Mercola says in his article “10 Minutes of Exercise Yield Hourlong Effects,” that one of the major benefits of interval exercises is that it gets your heart rate to a peak level, which actually increase your growth hormone level—yes, the very same HGH athletes inject illegally. He says:
In order to better grasp the benefits of peak fitness exercises, you first need to understand that you have three different types of muscle fibers: slow, fast, and super-fast. And only ONE of these muscles will impact your production of a vital hormone called HGH, or human growth hormone, which is KEY for strength, health and longevity…
… The super-fast ones are the white muscle fibers. They contain far less blood and less densely packed mitochondria. These muscle fibers are what you use when you do anaerobic short burst exercises.
High intensity burst cardio is the form of exercise that will engage these super fast fibers. They're ten times faster than slow fibers, and this is the key to producing growth hormone!
There are many variations of high intensity interval workouts, but this is the simplest form: the push your heart rate into the hardest, highest possible training zone for 30 seconds, and then recover slowly for 90 seconds. Repeat this cycle eight times for a total of only 16 minutes of work.
You’ll want to warm up for three minutes before you begin, and you should begin sweating heavily within the first three rounds. During the 30-second work period, it will be incredibly hard to talk or even breathe. That’s where the magic happens.
One of the best things about HIIT is that the intensity is variable—for some it will be a workout of fast walking alternating with slow walking, for others, it’ll be race-pace cycling alternating with recovery cycling. You can do HIIT in just about any exercise, inside a gym or outside of it. The possibilities are literally endless!
Check out our Hotel Room Exercises article and video for easy ways to implement HIIT into your routine, traveling or at home.
Lyssa Myska Allen is editorial director at EndlessBeauty.com and a CrossFit Level 1-certified trainer.
Pictured: CrossFit Games competitor Lindsey Smith, image from CrossFitChron
Comments
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