How To Get The Most Out of HIIT

By Howe Russ


It is often said that learning how to lose weight is sometimes needlessly over complicated. Despite the numerous scientific advancements we have made in the last 20 years, the old classic formulas still return the best results. One of those formulas is HIIT.

Just like resistance training, there are various ways to perform this style of workout and your overall fitness goal will determine which method is best suited for you. Most people don't learn these different methods and therefore don't see any results. Today we will teach them to you.

Walk into any fitness center and you are going to notice two very different groups of people who prefer two extremely different training methods. You'll have those who are at their happiest when they are left to their own devices on a treadmill for an hour or more, then you'll have those who think that approach sounds like hell. This group like to focus much more on resistance training instead.

High intensity interval training provides both groups with a stepping stone between their respective styles, offering the benefits of both methods in one workout.

Who should be exercising this way? Well, to a certain degree absolutely anybody can get results with the many variations of interval training which are out there. It has been proven to burn fat at an increased rate and also to increase lean muscle tissue, so regardless of your overall fitness goal there is undoubtedly a place for this in your workout routine.

For those looking to lose fat there is one significant factor which makes high intensity interval training so appealing. This is often referred to as "The Afterburn Effect". When you finish a regular cardiovascular training session your body stops burning off calories the moment you leave the gym but with an interval workout you continue for up to 16 hours. This makes the fat loss benefits of this training method particularly great.

Take a look below at the most common variations of interval training and you will be able to apply one of these methods to your own training routine easily.

* Tabata Interval Training.

* Interval training specific for sports.

* Interval training specifically to reduce body fat.

Tabata's were developed in the 1990's and involve possibly the shortest, yet hardest, interval workout of all time. This was designed with elite athletes in mind so if you are new to the gym you may want to hold off on this concept for a while.

Despite already being considered 'elite' in their field, researchers found that a group of athletes who used this method were able to further improve their VO2 Max by a massive 28%.

Tabata intervals can be performed on any piece of equipment and the total workout time, minus warm-up and cool-down periods, is only four minutes long. Those 4 minutes contain of eight 30 second sections, each consisting of 20 seconds at maximum intensity followed by 10 seconds of light recovery.

If your goal is to improve performance for a sport then there is a slight variation on the Tabata method which will work well for you. This involves performing a longer workout, between 20 and 30 minutes in total, which combines a cardiovascular activity as your high intensity work and a resistance exercise as your recovery. One good example of this would be to combine a 400 meter sprint on a rowing machine with 30 seconds of push-ups. That particular session is used by many professional rowing clubs.

Finally, there are numerous people who are looking to use this training method to lose body fat. The method which has the most scientific research to support it comes from Canada. A thirty minute session which consisted of four minutes at a moderate intensity followed by a thirty second burst of maximal intensity returned superior results to any other time split.

Furthermore, regardless of whether your goal is weight loss or building muscle, recent scientific studies show that performing high intensity interval training before your resistance training increases the body's natural ability to perform both of the goals listed above.

Learning how to lose weight can be a tricky affair, with so much contradicting information in circulation. The three styles of HIIT given in today's post have the most scientific evidence to support their benefits and, depending upon which category you fit into, you will be able to fit one of these into your existing weights routine.




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