HIIT It

Today I started my HIIT traiing. HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training. The concept is that you do intervals alternating between max intensity and rest. By pushing your intensity level up as high as you can go, you achieve two important benefits. First, and foremost, you raise your metabolic rate for the entire recovery period, some say up to 24 hours post-workout. Second, you achieve more calorie expenditure in a shorter amount of time. This is just my understanding at this point, and I'm brand new to the whole thing but I can tell you I felt incredible energy after my first session and that I plan on continuing the workout for the near future.

In greater detail, what I did was to hop on the elliptical machine at work and select the "Interval" preset. This brings up a workout display that looks like a square wave, two bars at level 1, followed by two bars at level 4, and so on repeating for the whole workout. In my case, this was 30 minutes. So, for the first two minutes, I just went easy and monitored my heart rate. My heartrate at the low intensity stage was around 140 BPM and I was clocking about 100 RPMs on the elliptical. Then, at the first spike in the workout graph, I went balls out as fast as I could go. I watch my heartrate leap to over 180 BPM and the RPMs go above 200. This is incredibly tiring and will really have you gasping for breath. The good news is, the high intensity only last for 90 seconds, then you get to rest.

Repeat.

All told, I was on the machine for 30 minutes. During the workout I sure got some weird looks. I'm a big guy and it must have been hilarious to see me flailing my arms and legs that fast on the machine. I didn't care. It felt great and I believe in the science behind this method.

More details to follow as I learn more and experiment on the frequency and duration of the intensity intervals. For now, I'm pretty well sold on the idea.

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