What is HIIT, and Can it Improve your Workouts?

The popularity of high intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts have become a staple in the fitness world. The hallmark of HIIT is repeated, extremely hard bouts of work interspersed with periods of recovery. During your work intervals, you’ll be challenging yourself nearly to your max, Noam Tamir, C.S.C.S., founder and CEO of TS Fitness in New York City, tells SELF.com.

HIIT Training is popular, because it can easily be modified for people of all fitness levels and multiple health issues, such as being overweight or battling diabetes. HIIT workouts can be performed on all exercise modes, including cycling, walking, swimming, aqua training, elliptical cross-training, and in many group exercise classes. HIIT workouts provide similar fitness benefits as continuous endurance workouts, but in shorter periods of time.

What are the benefits of HIIT?

HIIT training has been shown to improve:

• aerobic and anaerobic fitness

• blood pressure

• cardiovascular health

• insulin sensitivity (which helps the exercising muscles more readily use glucose for fuel to

make energy)

• cholesterol profiles

• abdominal fat and body weight while maintaining muscle mass

When your body is going all-out during true HIIT, it relies on your anaerobic pathways (breaking down glucose without oxygen) to produce the energy it needs to fuel you. This provides an immediate supply of energy, but the amount is very limited—which means the length of time you can sustain that max effort is quite short, says Tamir.

In fact, in true HIIT, you’d likely limit your work intervals to about 20 seconds, he says. Then you’d give yourself ample recovery time, usually at about a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio of rest to work. So if you were doing 20-second sprints, you’d rest for 40 seconds to one minute before beginning your next interval. (This is different from what many people call HIIT, where their work periods are way longer and rest periods much shorter, meaning they can’t go as all-out.)

Regardless of age, gender and fitness level, one of the keys to safe participation of HIIT

training is for all people to modify the intensity of the work interval to a preferred challenging

level. Safety in participation should always be primary priority, and people should focus

more on finding their own optimal training intensities as opposed to keeping up with other

persons.

HIIT workouts are more exhaustive then steady state endurance workouts. Therefore, a

longer recovery period is often needed. Perhaps start with one HIIT training workout a week,

with your other workouts being steady state workouts. As you feel ready for more challenge,

add a second HIIT workout a week, making sure you spread the HIIT workouts throughout

the week.

Baxter Fitness has a selection of the new FLUID POWER ZONE MACHINES https://firstdegreefitness.com/fluidpowerzone/ which are optimal for HIIT training. Mike Studer, National Award Winner Neurology & Geriatrics, comments on Fluid Power Zone for his PT patients, "Rarely does a session go by that does not include at least one stop or an entire circuit of the Fluid Power zone for my patients--regardless of diagnosis. Can any of us imagine a patient that does not need more power? Fluid Power Zone gives me the opportunity to build the most adaptable, functional type of concentric contraction that I can identify; moving at a safe and pain-free speed for your own body tolerance...Gradually increasing that to the maximal speed that you want to exert...being incentivized the whole time to do as much as you can."

Fluid Power Zone was developed by Andy Baxter, Baxter Fitness Solutions, https://www.facebook.com/FluidPowerZone/videos/300790873854672/

Additional Content provided by Len Kravitz, Ph.D, American College of Sports Medicine. https://www.acsm.org/docs/default-source/files-for-resource-library/high-intensity-interval-training.pdf Mike Studer, PT, MHS, NCS, CEEAA, CWT, CSST