Don’t Screw Up Your Interval Training

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you know that interval training has become quite popular in cardio workout training circles.

As a quick rundown, interval training (also called HIIT – High Intensity Interval Training) is a type of cardio training where you intersperse short bouts of very hard, very intense work, with short bouts of rest. The idea is to go as hard as you possibly can during your bouts of exercise. Work intervals and rest intervals can be on any kind of timing interval – work can be longer than your rest, they can be equal, or rest can be longer than your work. What kind of work and rest intervals you choose depend on what kind of shape you’re in.

Interval training has become so popular in recent years because of the more profound effects it can have on your cardio training compared to more traditional, long, slow distance (LSD) training.

Interval training has shown to increase anaerobic and aerobic capacities (where as LSD only increases aerobic capacities). It can be helpful in power production, and because of the intense nature of interval training, it doesn’t lend itself to lead to muscle loss. It’s highly beneficial for fat loss because even though it might not burn as many calories during your actual cardio workout itself, it keeps the metabolism revved up for hours after your workout is over. And unlike LSD training, it’s not uncommon for an interval training cardio workout to be done fairly quickly – even as little as 15-20 minutes (including warmups and cool down).

So, if HIIT is so beneficial, why are there not more people having amazing results from it?

Simple really – they don’t work hard enough.

When it comes to cardio training, intensity and duration are inversely proportional. So, you can go long, or you can go hard, but you can’t do both. It’s either going to be long and slow, or short and fast.

Well, it’s the latter with HIIT.

And most people simpley don’t work hard enough.

HIIT has to be – as the name implies – intense. To illicit the physiological response you’re looking for, you literally have to be working as hard as humanly possible. If you’re running, you have to be running as if a crazed pitbull was chasing you.

You see, most people like the idea of doing HIIT for their cardio workouts because they get rest breaks. They figure they can go hard for no longer than a minute or so, then get to rest before they have to work hard again.

The problem is that they aren’t going much harder than they would if they were doing some sort of LSD cardio.

Remember where I just said that when it comes to your cardio workouts, you could either go fast and short, or long and slow? Well, when you dog your interval training, you’re actually going slow and short. That’s the worst case scenario.

I put it like this – if you aren’t sure if you’re working hard enough during your interval training workouts, then the answer is that you’re not. You need to kick it up a few notches and get to working hard.

Train Hard, Rest Hard, Play Hard.