How to do High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)

(photo by johnthescone)

You may have heard of a little something called interval training when reading some fitness related information lately.

And there’s good reason for that. High intensity interval training (or HIIT as it’s known for short) is fast becoming a huge phenomenon in the fat loss arena due to its tremendous capability to burn away body fat and rev up your metabolism in record time.

Recent research has shown that interval training burns 9 times more body fat than your average slow cardio workout, which would be remarkable in itself. But what’s even crazier is that it achieves these amazing results in just a fraction of the time that traditional cardio workouts take.

Here’s a quick little introductory video to this blog post. You can either watch this first or skip it and go right on ahead to the blog. It’s basically a very short version of what I cover in the blog without the details:

If you’re a newbie to interval training, you’re probably salivating at the thought of melting away body fat in workouts of 20 minutes or less, but you also probably have no idea about how to do intervals, since every article you read about them gives you conflicting information.

So my aim in this blog post is to simply and clearly explain to you exactly:

• What interval training is

• How to do it

• And how to adjust the intensity so that it produces the optimal results for you

What is interval training?

Simply put, interval training means training for a period of time at a high intensity and then training for a period of time at a lower intensity, alternating between these two phases for a given length of time.

So how do I actually ‘do’ interval training?

Well, let me demonstrate by showing you an example. If you were doing an interval training routine where you were using running as your high intensity exercise and resting as your low intensity exercise, your interval training session might look like this:

Run for 20 seconds
Rest for 20 seconds
Run for 20 seconds
Rest for 20 seconds
Repeat for a 4 minute duration

Essentially what you want to do is pick an exercise for your high intensity period and then aim to do as many reps as you can within your high intensity time frame. So, if you were running, as in the example above, you would aim to run as fast and as far as you could within those 20 seconds.

If, however, you were doing bodyweight squats or jumping jacks for your high intensity period, you would simply try and do as many squats or jumping jacks as you could within those 20 seconds.

For the low intensity period, you want to either pick a relatively low intensity movement, such as walking or glute bridges or even a mobility exercise, and do that during the allotted time frame. Or, if you’re really going all-out during your high intensity phase, you can just rest for the low intensity period instead.

The idea is that you really push yourself during the high intensity phase and then use the low intensity phase to allow your body to recover somewhat before pushing yourself through the high intensity phase again.
How do I adjust interval training to my current level of fitness?

Interval training can be tricky for newbies because it’s hard to know where to start. Which exercises should you choose, how long should your high vs low intensity intervals be, how do you progress your interval training as you get fitter – all of these questions might be popping into your head and confusing you.

So. to help you out, I’m going to give you some basic guidelines for how to adjust interval training to your level of fitness and how to progress it as needed.

• When you’re just starting out on your workout program and are not used to rigorous exercise, it’s important that you don’t go too intense too fast. This can be lead to injury and over-training, which are completely counterproductive. So instead, what you want to do is start out at a moderate level and work your way up from there.
  A good typical starting point that I use with my clients is to use brisk walking as your high intensity phase, and casual walking as your low intensity phase. If you were to rank intensity of effort on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being all-out max effort and 1 being almost no effort at all, you would want your brisk walk to be around a 6 and your casual walk to be around a 3.
  You want to initially keep your high intensity phases short and your low intensity phases longer, and slowly increase the high intensity duration while decreasing the low intensity duration until you are eventually spending the same amount of time on both phases.
  Spend anywhere from 30 seconds to 1 minute walking briskly and anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes walking casually to start out with. Alternate these phases back and forth for a total of 20 minutes per interval training session, with no rest at all in between. I would start out performing this routine 3 times per week and working up to 5 times per week, for a person who is very out of shape and has not worked out in a long time.

• As you get fitter, you can make your intervals harder and harder. You can do this through a number of methods:
  • Start out by increasing the time you spend in your high intensity phase
  • The next step is decreasing the amount of time you spend in your low intensity phase
  • Keep doing the above steps until you have reached a ratio of 1:1 high intensity to low intensity time periods
  • Once you have got to this point, increase the difficulty of the exercises you are using and adjust the time periods once again so that you are spending less time on the high intensity phase and more time on the low intensity phase
  • Repeat the above steps ad nauseum to keep raising the level of difficulty.

• You want to keep the duration of your interval training fairly short – no more than 20 minutes, and as little as just a minute or two (micro workouts, anyone?). Start out with longer durations when your interval training is less exhausting and gradually shorten the overall time spent doing intervals as your workouts get harder and harder. I know that a 4 minute session seems like nothing, but believe me, once you experience doing intervals of jumping split squats for 20 seconds followed by rest for 10 seconds, 4 minutes will seems like a lifetime. Likewise, the harder your workouts get, the fewer times per week you can do them. A deconditioned person doing a relatively ‘easy’ interval workout could do it every day of the week without much of a problem. However, doing the split squat interval training mentioned above every day would be very intense and would only be necessary for hardcore athletes and extremely fit people. There would be no need for the average person to do them every day; 2-3 times per week would be more than enough.

So, to flesh out the above points in more detail, let’s look at an example progression:

1. Start out with a relatively easy interval – brisk walk for 15 secs and casual walk for 1 min. 20 minutes total time for interval workout.
2. Gradually increase time spent on brisk walk and decrease time spent on casual walk until you are spending 30 seconds on each phase. 20 minutes total workout.
3. Increase the difficulty of exercises, so that your high intensity phase is now a jog, instead of a brisk walk. Low intensity exercise remains casual walk. Re-adjust interval phases so that you are now spending 20 seconds jogging and 1 min walking. 15 minutes total time for workout.
4. Gradually increase time spent jogging and decrease time spent on casual walk until you are spending 30 seconds on each phase. 15 minutes total workout.
5. Increase the difficulty of exercises, so that your high intensity phase is now a moderate run instead of a jog. Low intensity exercise is reduced to very light walking. Re-adjust interval phases so that you are now spending 10 seconds running and 90 seconds walking. 10 minutes total time for workout.
6. Keep repeating the above steps, until you have reached the point where you are sprinting for your high intensity exercise and resting for your low intensity exercise for a total phase duration of 20 seconds each and a total workout time of 4 minutes. At this point, you’ve pretty much reached the peak. You can extend the overall time of the workout to longer than 4 minutes if you want to really push yourself, or you can start mixing up your exercises to weighted movements or combo exercises like burpees, instead of sprinting.

See how that worked? We continually made the interval periods harder before making our exercises harder. We also shortened the overall workout time as the workouts got tougher and tougher.

The key thing is to make sure that you are able to really give it your all during the high intensity phases, as that’s where most of the benefit of the workout occurs. So if you find that you just have no energy during your high intensity phase, you need to either tone down the exercise or more likely increase your rest periods so that you can rest up a little better between your high intensity phases.

Final Thoughts

The truth is that even after reading this, you’re probably still not 100% clear about how to do interval training, and that’s only to be expected. It’s one of those things where you just can’t fully ‘get it’ until you’ve done it a bunch yourself.

So get out there and start doing some intervals and you’ll find that you get the hang of it pretty quickly. Pick a high intensity exercise, pick a low intensity exercise (or decide that you’re going to rest during the low intensity phase), pick some durations for your high and low intensity phasese that you feel would be adequate for your level of fitness, and have at it. You’ll quickly be able to tell whether you’ve picked the right parameters for you or whether they need adjusting.

I hope that this blog post has helped clarify some points regarding interval training that you may have had, and that you now start using interval training instead of slow cardio in your workouts in order to help you burn away fat faster than ever.

As always, I’m more than happy to answer any questions or comments, so feel free to leave some below and we can discuss this topic as much as you’d like.

If you enjoyed this blog post, please help spread the word by clicking the Share/Save button below to add it to your favorite social bookmarking site. Also, if you want to get regular email updates every time I make a new post, as well as getting exclusive access to ebooks, videos, audios and other bonus material that I send out only to my newsletter subscribers, make sure you put your name and email in the box below: