Why Do HIIT Workouts?

High Intensity Interval Training has become a popular, mainstream training mode that offers many benefits both for fitness and health.

“Why should I do HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training)?”

I have written about HIIT workouts before, Olympic Lifts & HIIT and Train Less For More but here I want to go into a little more detail on what it will do for your body's fitness, strength and health.

Let’s start by defining what a HIIT workout is - High Intensity Interval Training involves short periods of hard work with short rest or recovery intervals in between.

HIIT has also been called HIIE (High Intensity Intermittent Exercise) or SIT (Sprint Interval Training) with this latter version associated more often with field sports conditioning or cardiovascular training.

HIIT is very anaerobic in nature and will certainly challenge you but it is a shorter workout in general than most set and rep type sessions.

“Can I build muscle doing HIIT workouts?”

Absolutely! Have you seen some of the Crossfit athletes? These guys are in good shape and the majority of their workouts are HIIT based. As long as your muscle is put under appropriate training stress to overload it with resistance of some kind then it will adapt and grow. HIIT will not elicit maximal hypertrophy, to achieve this you will need to follow a specific training programme with good appropriate nutrition as well.

Progressive Overload is a training principle that has been around and understood for a long time. Milo of Croton, a 6th century Greek wrestler lifted a newborn calf onto his shoulders and repeated this every day as the calf grew until some 4 years later Milo was lifting a bull!

This is a story that is often used as an anecdote to progressive loading and can be applied to traditional strength and hypertrophy training as well as HIIT and Crossfit type workouts.

“Can I get fitter as well as stronger doing HIIT workouts?”

Definitely! HIIT will place a huge demand on your cardiovascular system as well as generate large amounts of lactate. This will increase lactate tolerance and raise your lactate threshold too; both of which are important for improving anaerobic fitness.

Using resistance such as barbells, dumbells as part of your HIIT workout will help increase your strength endurance, boost your metabolism and increase your calorie burn!

"What are the health benefits?"

HIIT workouts have been shown to help reduce the risk of metabolic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular and coronary artery disease as well as atherosclerosis. There is also evidence that HIIT can increase arterial elasticity which decreases with age.

“Should I only do HIIT workouts?”

Not necessarily, you can as there is enough variety in HIIT to ensure you don't get stale, bored or stop adapting to the training.

However, HIIT can also be incorporated into a strength or endurance workout plan as well and in fact will add considerably to both. It is an extremely versatile way to train as the equipment you use varies, there are body weight options if travelling for business or pleasure and you don't need a huge amount of space for most of the workouts!

“How will I stay motivated if they are so tough?”

The great thing about most of the HIIT workouts is that they have some sort of target. This is usually in the form of working out for a set time i.e. 40s work 20s rest for 10 sets so you know of you have to keep moving during the work efforts; another example would be having a set number of reps to complete as quickly as possible for the given exercises i.e. 15, 12, 10, 8, 5 of each exercise.

Seeing your times come down or your reps increase will keep you motivated as it shows you are definitely getting fitter and stronger!

So you can see that there are many options, variations and benefits from HIIT workouts and that you don't have to make many changes to your current workout plan in order to incorporate them.

To find out more about HIIT and how to plan your training Get in touch with me on tsilvester@getcoached.net or to get more HIIT workouts and challenges subscribe to my closed Facebook group The HIIT Works by Get Coached via my Facebook page Get Coached