HIIT increases your metabolism and helps you build muscle quicker!
What is HIIT?
High-Intensity Interval Training is a cardiovascular training system used by lots of people from professional athletes to your average gym goer who wants to keep themselves fitter and healthier.
High Intensity is rated as 80% or over a person’s maximum heart rate and not to exceed 95% anything less than 80% is anaerobic or aerobic exercise. Best measured with accurate heart rate monitors and a guess of your maximum heart rate using 220.
Your age HIIT can be largely beneficial in many factors not only when we are trying to lose fat some of which are:
- Improving stamina
- Better VO2 maximum
- Strengthens bones
- Stress Relief
- Lowers blood pressure
How do we do HIIT?
There’s something I need to get off my chest here! All these fitness videos you see of people doing jumping jacks, high knees, squats, etc, and calling it HIIT is just incorrect.
With HIIT we want to elevate our HR (Heart rate) during the work interval to 80-95% as quickly as possible and keep it there as long as possible.
Then during the resting interval allows the body to recover with very minimal or no movement until your HR is below 60% for a little while and then repeat to a work interval shortly after this HR is achieved.
These “HIIT” videos you see on social media doing jumping jack etc is not an effective way to elevate your HR to 80-95% fast! Therefore it does not reap the benefits as stated above.
Instead, we must focus on a piece of equipment or certain movement that can get us there quickly.
My personal preference is performing this training on an Assault Treadmill, Ski Erg, Watt Bike or Battle Ropes. Reason being it allows me and my clients to reach a 80-95% HR very quickly and in between intervals when resting allows no active movement to focus on breathing and reducing your HR to recover.
HIIT is not meant to be performed for long periods of time but to be performed with more rounds.
You can play around with resting intervals, work intervals and/or quantity of rounds to progress this training and continue to benefit more with this training system. The best way to tell if your producing a maximal effort whilst doing HIIT and doing it correctly is by round 3 to 5 of the work interval your lungs feel like they are burning your breathing is very erratic and your Rating of Perceived Exertion is 10/10.
HIIT and Fat Loss
Now the part you are all interested in! Many studies have shown that HIIT boosts HGH levels by 300-700% in the body.
How does this help us lose fat you may ask?
Well HGH (Human Growth Hormone) is a hormone our body produces for a variety of reasons and inhibits something we call cortisol in our bodies. Cortisol is what’s known as the stress hormone which in high levels causes weight gain. Increasing your HGH levels will help you look younger, speed up your metabolism and also build muscle quicker!
Imagine a slider on the left is HGH on the right is Cortisol the left side looks a little like this. Your building muscle quicker, your metabolism is faster and your look younger. The right side your gaining weight, your muscles are feeling weaker and your experiencing low mood swings. Chances are your sliding that scale towards the left which means you want to perform HIIT to slide that scale to the left side.
In conclusion, HIIT increases your metabolism and helps you build muscle quicker! So not only does it help fat loss but it helps you get stronger by increasing the levels of HGH in your body by 300-700%!
So, 2 birds with 1 stone!
Got a goal in mind? Don’t know where to start? Then start with me!
