It's easy to get addicted to high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts. They are short in time, melt fat and build muscle. In addition, they bring you the best exercise effect that will make you feel like running a marathon. While it's tempting to get into the HIIT habit every day, it's not always the best idea for your body.
When you do HIIT, your body releases cortisol, the stress hormone, which causes an increase in heart and respiratory rates, pulse rate and blood pressure. This makes for a good physical stressor because it activates your body's fight or flight response without burdening you with health problems.
But if you do too much, it can keep your cortisol levels through the roof when combined with other life stressors (like the COVID-19 pandemic). And that's where you get into trouble because it puts your body in a chronic state of stress, which can lead to weight gain, heart disease and diabetes.
What is?
HIIT training involves short bursts of intense exercise alternated with low-intensity recovery periods. Interestingly, it is perhaps the most time efficient way to exercise. In general, a training of this type will have a duration from 10 to 30 minutes.
Despite how short the workout is, it can produce health benefits similar to twice that of moderate-intensity exercise. The actual activity being performed varies, but may include sprinting, bicycling, jumping rope, or other bodyweight exercises.
For example, a HIIT workout on a stationary bike might consist of 30 seconds of cycling as fast as possible with high resistance, followed by several minutes of slow, easy cycling with low resistance. This would be considered a "round" or "rep" of HIIT, and typically 4-6 repetitions would be done in a workout.
The specific amount of time you exercise and recover will vary depending on the activity we choose and the intensity of the exercise. Regardless of how we do this routine, high-intensity intervals should include short bouts of vigorous exercise that gets the heart rate up.
Effects
High-intensity interval training sessions have numerous health benefits, but there are also some risks to be aware of. Although it has positive effects, doing it in excess can overshadow its benefits.
Your heart could work too hard
This type is a cardiovascular exercise, so it naturally increases your heart rate and blood oxygen demand.
During HIIT, your heart works harder, which means tu blood pressure and heart rate increase at higher rates than low-intensity steady-state exercises. The higher cardiac output can result in increased arterial dilation, which expands the blood vessels and increases blood flow.
This increased demand for oxygen during exercise, followed by rest, helps make the heart more efficient. Therefore, the heart not only pumps blood better, but it is able to pump more blood with each beat, all of which can lower stress and ultimately lower blood pressure.
Also, HIIT training increases tyour energy and stamina levels, which are associated with a reduced risk of heart attack. In fact, it's a great way to meet physical activity guidelines and lower your risk of cardiovascular disease, according to a July 2019 article in the World Journal of Cardiology.
Although this type of training can do great things for your heart, you should avoid doing it every day. The key is to do a variety of exercises and not do the same exercises over and over.
If you have a condition cardiac, ask your doctor before starting a high-intensity routine. You may need to adjust the intensity of your training. Signs that you might be overexerting yourself during exercise include shortness of breath, chest pain, and dizziness, according to Harvard Health Publishing. If you experience any of these symptoms, you should stop exercising and call your doctor.
The muscle fibers are more fatigued
During HIIT workouts, your body activates fast-twitch muscle fibers. FYI, you have two main muscle fibers: type I (slow twitch) and type II (fast twitch).
Type II muscle fibers, which are denser and larger, are used for short, powerful exercises that bring you close to exhaustion. Think explosive moves like sprints while you run or ride a bike, burpees y jumps to the drawer, all of which are classic HIIT moves.
Although fast-twitch muscle fibers generate energy quickly, they also fatigue faster and require more recovery. That's why you can't jump squat like there's no tomorrow. And after pushing yourself for a brief amount of time, your body needs about a minute of rest to refuel your muscles before it's ready to handle another round.
Although the foundation is cardio, tapping into fast-twitch muscle fibers also promotes muscle growth and strength, giving you cardiovascular and strength benefits.
But be careful not to overdo it; The best thing is to do HIIT only two or three times to week.
We are all different with unique strengths and weaknesses. Not everyone can push themselves to the max every day without injury. Which means that for some, doing HIIT three to five times a week feels like a walk in the park, while for others two or three a week may be enough.
Your body can't recover
There's no question that HIIT training is a calorie shredder. You consume an excessive amount of oxygen after exercise (EPOC), and your body suffers an afterburn effect when you do such a workout because you create an oxygen deficit.
After an intense workout, your body needs extra oxygen to return to its normal metabolic state, and in the process, it burns more calories 24-48 hours after your workout ends.
The higher the intensity of the workout, the more oxygen is required to recover, which means your system is working to catch up long after you've left the gym, compared to moderate-intensity cardio.
While you're in the afterburn zone, you're also burning tons of fat. The goal of the high-intensity portion of your workout is to move from the aerobic zone to the anaerobic zone, which helps burn fat.
Still, you should avoid doing these workouts every day to avoid the overtraining and injury. Doing too much high-intensity exercise, or any form of exercise, too often without adequate recovery can also lead to metabolic problems, including overtraining syndrome and lactic acid buildup, all of which can put a huge distance between you and your objectives.
Your immunity may weaken
There's plenty of research showing that exercising can help strengthen your immune system, but doing too much, especially HIIT every day, can be counterproductive.
According to a May 2017 study in the Journal of Applied Physiology, high-intensity exercise without adequate recovery can cause your overall immunity to drop, making you more susceptible to infections. If you continue to train with low immunity, you increase the chance of more infections.
You have to find a balance so that your body can work efficiently and effectively. Having a balanced exercise routine that includes rest days and is accompanied by a daily routine of balanced eating, plenty of water and other hydrating fluids, such as caffeine-free tea and broths, will keep your body healthy and able to fight disease.
Since HIIT forces you to work at maximum effort with minimal rest, you should take a few recovery days between sessions to allow your muscles to recharge. Doing high-intensity interval training two to three times a week is enough to reap its benefits without overdoing it.
Your joints could suffer with HIIT
When done correctly, the exercise is generally safe, but it does have some inherent risks of injury. as it is full of movements plyometrics, it can put extra pressure on the joints.
The most common injuries associated with these workouts occur to the lower extremities, such as knee or ankle sprains and muscle or tendon strains, which can also occur with other high-impact activities, such as running and jumping.
There is also the risk of back and shoulder injuries, which can be associated with repeated bending or lifting.
To help keep injuries at bay, it is important to maintain a good form or neuromuscular controlespecially if you are tired. Start off slow, then build up speed and stamina over time is also key. Proper recovery and stretching are also essential.
How many should be done per week?
To keep the body and mind healthy, exercise is essential. But due to the fast pace of life today, you may find it difficult to add a proper exercise routine. HIIT is the perfect way to condense the benefits of activity into 30 minutes or less. But when it comes to intense exercise like HIIT, doing it every day or for periods of more than 30 minutes can put you at risk for injury, overtraining, mental exhaustion, and prevent muscle recovery.
So how much HIIT should I do? two or three days a week it's a solid amount of HIIT, as long as there's 24 hours of rest and recovery between sessions. So if the goal is to exercise four times a week, two HIIT sessions and two resistance training sessions are recommended. Whether you go full body on those endurance days or split it up into an upper body day and a lower body day is up to you.
You have to take into account the training schedule. If you do intensive leg resistance training one day, then do HIIT sprints the next, your legs will be sore and won't fully recover for HIIT. Try to schedule a rest or yoga day in between for optimal results. We are not saying that HIIT is not dab, nor that we stop exercising regularly. Doing some kind of movement every day is good For both physical and mental health, that's something all the experts agree on. But if we've exhausted HIIT sessions three times a week, we can head to a yoga class or hop on the bike for a casual ride in the sun.
Is it useful to lose weight?
You can burn calories quickly using HIIT. If we compare calories burned during 30 minutes of HIIT, weight training, running, and cycling, HIIT burns 25-30% more calories than other forms of exercise.
In this study, one repetition of HIIT consisted of 20 seconds of all-out effort followed by 40 seconds of rest. This means that you actually exercise only a third of the time. Although each training session lasts 30 minutes, it is common for HIIT workouts to be much shorter than traditional exercise sessions. This is because HIIT allows us to burn roughly the same number of calories but spend less time exercising.
Moreover, studies have shown that HIIT training can help lose fat. Both HIIT and traditional moderate-intensity exercise can reduce body fat and waist circumference. Some studies also indicate that HIIT can reduce body fat despite the relatively short time commitment.
Tips for getting started with HIIT
There are many ways to add high-intensity intervals to your exercise routine, so it's not hard to get started. To get started, we just have to choose an activity (running, biking, jumping rope, etc.). Then we can experiment with different exercise and recovery durations, or how long we will do intense exercise and how long we want to recover.
It is recommended to keep in mind some tricks to create a HIIT routine:
- Choose a modality with which we are familiar at a lower intensity. For example, we won't push ourselves to the maximum in running if we haven't done any jogging lately.
- If we have joint pain, we will start with a lower impact modality such as cycling or swimming.
- We will make long enough rest periods. We can maintain sufficient intensity for HIIT only if we do rest periods equal to or longer than work periods.
- We will keep work periods under 30 seconds. Work periods longer than 30 seconds will be difficult to maintain at the intensity required to count as HIIT.
- We'll start with a few intervals twice a week. HIIT training is very demanding, especially when performing higher impact modalities. Proper recovery between training sessions is imperative to avoid injury.
Examples
If we need inspiration to do this type of training, we can start doing HIIT in the following ways:
- Using a stationary bike, we will pedal as hard and fast as possible for 30 seconds. Then, we will pedal at a slow and easy pace for between 2 and 4 minutes. We will repeat this pattern for 15 to 30 minutes.
- After jogging to warm up, we will run as fast as possible for 15 seconds. Then we will walk or jog at a slow pace for 1-2 minutes. We will do this pattern again for 10 to 20 minutes.
- Do jump squats as fast as possible for 30-90 seconds. Then we will stand or walk for 30 to 90 seconds. We will repeat this pattern for 10 to 20 minutes.