Have you heard about High Intensity Interval Training AKA HIIT Training?
Are you doing what you need to in regards to your fitness and just not seeing results anymore? Or are you into your fitness and want to skyrocket your results and not have to be in the gym or exercising all day?
HIIT Training may very well be your missing link to ignite your metabolism, skyrocket your abilities, and walk around in the body of your dreams.
In today’s episode, I’m going to share with you how adding High Intensity Interval Training to your routine can skyrocket your results. You will watch your physique tone change and you’re going to get the weight off way faster than anything traditional.
I’m going to tell you a quick story. I had been in the fitness industry for a few years and had been competing doing very traditional stuff, traditional lifting, traditional cardio after lifting.
Although that had an Overall Title winning streak in my competitive career, I had a friend pull me aside and tell me that I definitely needed to implement HIIT style of training for overall body conditioning. He told me he thought I was going to find it massively impactful for my competitive career.
I figured out a routine and put HIIT into my week of workouts and boy, did my body change. It is the one single thing if you’re looking on how to move the needle forward for your fitness, while managing a finite time frame, add in HIIT training.
HIGH INTENSITY INTERVAL TRAINING – BENEFITS
The benefits of HIIT Training are mental and physical changes. I mean, you’re going to feel amazing, you’re going to experience major mental clarity and your body is going to change tremendously.
HIIT Training is going as hard as you can for a short amount of time and then going into our rest phase, so as hard as you can, rest, as hard as you can, rest.
- In doing that, it rapidly increases your cardio capacity.
- Burns body fat fast by revving your metabolism.
- It also helps preserve muscle mass. ( remember muscle burns 4x more calories at rest)
HIGH INTENSITY INTERVAL TRAINING – DON’TS
Let’s talk about reasons that you would not want to do HIIT training. If you’re brand new to fitness, HIIT is not for you.
I want you to take some time, work with a personal trainer or someone that knows what they’re doing, get your body under pressure, get your joints under some pressure, go through the movements, wake up your muscles, just get your body used to moving and do all of this with consistency.
You’ll want to have mastered the basics before you look at adding HIIT to your current regimen.
- If you have heart problems, you do not want to do HIIT. You want to make sure that you get cleared by your heart care physician before implementing HIIT for obvious reasons.
- If you’re injured, HIITs not for you.. If you have a joint that’s injured or something like that, get better before you throw HIIT into your world.
- If you’re under chronic stress, whether that be emotional or physical. When you’re under stress your body already feels like it’s working hard. That is an awesome way to experience injury fast is if you’re in a super stressed situation and you take it to the gym too and you add this crazy HIIT routine on top of it, that’s just not smart. Don’t do that.
However, some people here are listening and they’re going to do it anyway. If you’re going to do it anyway, do small 6 to 8 min amraps or 4 minutes tabata on the treadmill. Do bite-size pieces. Let your body recover. Get out from under the stress that you’re experiencing through the majority of your day and then come back to HIIT.
What I love about HIIT is that you can do it anywhere. You can do it in the gym, you can do it out in your yard, you can do it with your kids, you can do it in front of the TV.
It is very basic, normally no equipment required. It’s your body, it’s your body weight, it’s moving and plyometrics. You can do it at the gym with pull up bars and things like that. You can implement all kinds of things into HIIT style training, but I love that you can do it in a hotel room. If you’re an on the go type of person, no excuse. You’ve got some HIIT training in your back pocket.
Let’s talk about the different types of HIIT. I get questions about this frequently, so let’s run through them. Also, I do want to mention that just because HIIT is an awesome tool, more is not better.
If you’re implementing HIIT into your world, you want to look at doing it 2 to 3 times a week. Anything above that, I’m going to go ahead and call it over-training.
Over-training is not good. It’s not good for your endocrine system. It’s not good for your body. You need to heal. You need to recover from your workouts so that you can continue to progress.
HIIT Training – TABATA
Tabata is 4-minute working intervals. In those four minutes, you’re doing 20 seconds hard and fast followed by 10 seconds of rest, then right back to hard and fast for 20. You do that for 8 rounds, which equals 4 minutes.
If you’ve ever worked closely with me, you know that I normally am recommending Tabata workouts that have 3 to 5, four-minute interval sections with one minute rest in between. That’s kind of how I like to do it, but those are people who are used to working out. You can start with just four minutes.
Experience it, feel it out. If that goes good for you, next time you do it, add another one, so you’re doing 8-minute intervals, two rounds of Tabata.
HIIT Training – EMOM
EMOM so that stands for Every Minute On the Minute. It might be jumps squats. They would have you do every minute on the minute you’re going to finish your 20 reps and for the rest of that minute you rest. Then you go back at it for your designated amount of reps. Your EMOM is going to be set for a total time. Normally it’s like a 10 minute or even 15-minute EMOM where you’re doing a certain move for as many reps as prescribed every minute on the minute. At the top of the minute, you start again, until your time is up. EMOM‘s, I love them.
HIIT Training – AMRAP
AMRAP stands for as many reps as possible. I like to think of it as, as many rounds as possible because AMRAP‘s are always multiple exercises. You might have five deadlights followed by 10 pull-ups and then 20 jumping jacks or 20 jump ropes.
You go through all of those and then you start back again and it’s going to be for a set time. AMRAP‘S are like a 6 minute or an 8-minute session.
HIIT Training – CIRCUIT TRAINING
Circuit training is the reason I fell in love when I first started HIIT training. We did like a Bootcamp style circuit. We did a plyometric round and then took that into a lift. It would be squat jumps for 90 seconds, and then we would go into bicep curls for 90 seconds, and then it would just flow through.
I like training certain muscle groups. I set up ‘pull days’ where we were doing back, biceps, hamstrings, all of our pull muscles and then plyometrics mixed between.
Then, we’d have push days. We would put chest, shoulders, quads and tri’s with our push days.
Also, a full-body circuit is equally as awesome. Going through the whole body with plyometrics in between. Circuit training is what took my body to a whole new place accelerating leanness and muscle maturity.
HIIT Training – Freestyle
Freestyles are incredible, except I will tell you from personal experience that if you don’t have a plan, it’s not going to go so well. I have rocked not having a plan many, many times and it goes one of two ways.
Either you overtrain, you crush yourself into a little pulp on the ground OR you are on your phone. You’re like, oh, let me do a round, then you get back to it.
If you’re going to freestyle, make sure that you freestyle that plan onto paper before you take it to the gym or outside in the yard.
You may want to do like 45 seconds on, 30 seconds off. It depends on what you’re doing, but make sure that you have something designated and written out for ultimate success.
I’m going to drop a few of my favorites in this link below. Make sure that you grab those and try them out and let me know what you think.
Let me know if you do HIIT Training and what your favorite one is, I’d love to hear.
If you know someone this could help please share it and if you have any questions put them in the comments, I am happy to help. 💚