Today I did what I believe to be the hardest form of exercise, I had a HIIT session. HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training. What’s good about it is that it’s so effective you only need to train for a short amount of time to get the same benefits as if you have trained for hours, another massive plus is that you raise your fat burning, your metabolism for the next 24-48 hours. In other words you burn more even in your sleep. The negative thing is that you either feel like you’re about to faint or you might throw up, which to me is outweighed by the enormous benefits.

This form of training makes you much stronger, resilient and explosive in a very short amount of time. Say that you are training for a marathon, many people start running mile after mile after mile often giving up because of injuries, boredom or slow progress. Now if you start doing HIIT twice a week and running one long route instead, not only have you shorten your workout time, your overall performance is much better you’ve gained power and strength to be able to run at a higher pace for a longer time and you have prevented injuries by training this way.

A normal HIIT session should be around 20min-40min. Let’s make an example of a running HIIT, I would start with a 5 min jog to warm up, then I would run the fastest I could for a measured 150-200 meters then I walk back to the starting point and try to get my pulse down to below 120 beats per minute within 120sec after you finished running. I then do this 8 times before I have a slow 5 min jog to cool down. It also benefits you to try and calculate so that your first HIIT is as fast as your last in the same training session. As you get better you can do the running session as described above and shorten the rest time between the HIITs, try to get them down to 20-30sec between HIITs.

There are many different forms of HIIT: you can do circuit training where you move from different types of exercises with half a minute to a minutes rest in between, you can cycle, swim, climb, jump, weights, pushups or why not use kettlebells etc. You can also use the Tabata method where you give it your all for 20sec and rest for 10sec times 8, if you exercise different muscle groups you can do times 8 per muscle group. Hiit is also a excellent training method for children, they love the speed, action and variety. Their bodies responds to this training method even better than ours.

Now if you take away the feeling faint and occasionally throwing up I love this training method since I notice how much stronger and fitter I’ve become in a very short amount of time and as yet another bonus, if you want a shredded stomach, I mean whom doesn’t love a six pack this beats everything else.