When you hear the words cardio workout what generally comes to mind? For most people its getting on a treadmill, elliptical machine or rower and spending 30-45 mins doing a monotonous movement over and over with no change in pace. After a while your body adapts, you stop seeing results and you wonder why you’re stuck on that damn piece of equipment, not really getting anywhere with your fitness. While cardio workouts have the reputation for being less intense and low impact, there is a very specific way to spice up your cardio workout routine and challenge your body in a more focused and less time consuming way.
HIIT Training – or High Intensity Interval Training- is the fitness training method in which you challenge your body to its maximum potential for short bursts of time and immediately follow it with a period of rest or low impact activity. Because of the stress that HIIT training puts on your body, 3 minutes of high intensity interval rowing or sprinting on a treadmill can easily burn as many calories as ten minutes of jogging or cycling.
In fact, studies show that a couple weeks of HIIT training workouts can improve your body’s aerobic capacity just as much as 6 to 8 weeks of normal physical endurance training. The benefits don’t stop there. One of the greatest benefits of HIIT training is that it can improve your metabolism. In fact high intensity interval training can improve the body’s natural production of Human Growth Hormone by nearly 450% in the 24 hour period that follows your HIIT workout. That’s unbelievable news since HGH is responsible for slowing the natural aging process.
But aside from all the great health benefits that come from HIIT training, one of its greatest attributes is that it can save you a lot of time while helping you attain great physical results. Be honest with yourself, you don’t look forward to the 45 mins you have to spend people watching while slowly trekking on the elliptical. I promise 20 min of focused dynamic HIIT training will give you better results than a 45 min jog. You can also make almost any 5 min exercise routine more intense by fluctuating the work to rest ratio. The next time you start a 30 min exercise workout try just five minutes of 30 sec on / 30 sec off for your intervals. For the first 30 seconds, work at your peak performance; meaning push your body to its physical limits. You should be exercising as hard and fast as you possibly can. Then allow yourself to rest and recover for 30 seconds before pushing yourself to the brink yet again. After you’ve repeated this five times ask yourself how much harder and focused those five minutes were compared to the other 25 mins of your workout. I’m willing to bet you’ll be impressed with yourself and your body will reap the rewards of HIIT training.
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