HIIT+ Make sure that you take in 3 to 5 grams of creatine and 2 to 3 grams of beta-alanine 30 minutes before your intervals. Caffeine has been shown to acutely increase strength, delay fatigue and blunt the pain associated with high-intensity exercise. This can be buffered through the ingestion of beta-alanine. As your intervals progress, your muscles also start to fatigue through other mechanisms, such as the accumulation of lactic acid. If more creatine is available, this fuel is easier to synthesize, keeping you training faster and harder through each interval. After that, other energy systems start to take over.ĭuring your bouts of recovery, your phosphagen stores are recuperating. This produces energy at a very high rate, for anywhere from six to 30 seconds. Short, explosive bouts of activity rely mainly on the phosphagen energy system, which relies on the chemical reactions of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and creatine phosphate (CP). Battling ropes, boxing, hand cycling or even combo activities like the Airdyne bike will provide a metabolic boost akin to sprinting. HIIT+ With upper-body HIIT, your arms and delts may feel the burn but your lungs won’t be missed, either. Though the majority of the research done has revolved around running or cycling, new research published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research has shown that a tussle with the battling ropes - 15-second work intervals followed by 45 seconds of rest - held benefits similar to the lower-body activities. Instead, focus on giving a max effort on every single sprint.
HIIT+ Don’t be in a rush to dive into that next interval.
Researchers at the University of Western Ontario in Canada found that subjects who performed four to six 30-second sprints with four minutes of rest after each sprint lost twice the fat of a steady-state group - a ratio of 1:8. But what’s known about energy systems suggests that it may be more worth your while to aim for a ratio closer to 1:5, or 30 seconds of rest followed by 150 seconds of recovery. Many people favor work-to-rest ratios of 1:2 - 30 seconds of high-intensity work followed by 60 seconds of rest, for example. Remembering that the focus is on max effort, there’s no need to rush recovery. You don’t want to rest too long, but you also don’t want to deprive your body of rest. High-intensity activity, such as a 100-meter sprint or an out-of-the-saddle interval in a Spin class, places a high demand on working muscles as well as the central nervous system. Here are a few ways to ensure that your HIIT stays hot. If you’re going to push it to the redline multiple times in a single session - even if only for a few seconds - it’s important to give yourself every advantage possible. The mechanisms behind these perks are many but can be boiled down to a single, fundamental truth: Harder training yields better results.
The reasons for this seismic generational shift are legion, but chief among them are HIIT’s ability to burn fat at a faster rate while preserving or increasing muscle mass with far less of a time investment than LISS cardio. But over the last decade plus, the lab coats have systematically abandoned this approach in favor of high-intensity interval training, or HIIT, which calls for several near-max effort work segments interspersed with short periods of recovery. It used to be that this was the preferred method of slimming down or “tightening up” for many a physique-minded athlete. There is, with each new wave of research, little evidence to justify the use of low-intensity steady-state (LISS) cardio for anyone but the endurance athlete crowd.