Continuing with their series on fitness trends defining 2021, which last month featured mind and body fitness, this month Health & Sports talk about HIIT (high-intensity interval training). Recently, fitness professionals voted HIIT one of the top fitness trends for 2021, with the single most well-established benefit of interval training to be heart health. Intervals can boost cardio-respiratory health with a smaller time investment compared to continuous forms of exercise.
HIIT, the fitness trend du jour, promises the best workout in the least amount of time. Runners have used interval training for more than 100 years, alternating between sprints and jogging to improve their endurance, but HIIT didn’t really go mainstream until about a decade ago, when exercise physiologists started to come out with study after study demonstrating that intervals could deliver the biggest health improvement for your exercise time.
When researchers talk about HIIT, they’re referring to workouts that alternate hard-charging intervals, during which a person’s heart rate reaches at least 80 percent of its maximum capacity usually for one to five minutes, with periods of rest or less intense exercise. (It’s not easy to know that you’re working at 80 percent, but a Fitbit or heart rate monitor can help.)
So, for example, you’d jog for 10 minutes to warm up, then do four four-minute intervals of faster running, with three three-minute intervals of moderate jogging or brisk walking in between, and a five-minute cool down at the end. And you can substitute jogging with other aerobic exercises, such as biking or swimming. The whole routine should take 40 minutes. A shorter, and also heavily studied, example of an interval routine is the 10-by-1, which involves 10 one-minute bursts of exercise each followed by one minute of recovery.
Every year you’re probably thinking how can high-intensity interval training still be a trend? But the buzz isn’t going anywhere. In 2020, HIIT came in at number two on ACSM’s (American College of Sports Medicine) Health and Fitness Journal Worldwide Survey of Fitness Trends, so it looks as though HIIT remains to be one of the top ways to work out.
A major benefit of HIIT is that you can burn a lot of calories through a combination of active bursts and a short period of rest. This makes it ideal for a population that’s busy and lacking in free time. Popular HIIT workouts include a combination of cardio, bodyweight exercises, and free weights, so for more information on gym facilities Auckland please go to https://www.healthandsports.co.nz .
