Do you feel you need to lose weight? Do you want to become fit but fail because you lack sufficient time?
According to a study by WHO, 80% of adolescents around the world do less than 60 minutes of activity each day. Sixty minutes of physical exercise is considered the bare minimum recommended by expert medical practitioners.
With this disappointing situation, we must start taking the initiative to exercise daily or at least 3-4 times every week. But, our work routines hamper us from implementing this plan.
But the good news is, for those unable to carry out regular exercises, you are about to get HIIT! High-Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT, hits the bull’s eye with this situation and may solve your exercising woes.
What is High-Intensity Interval Training?
High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is a form of physical exercise that involves short, intense workouts. In this type of physical training, you exercise with maximum effort, for short periods of time. Following this exercise period, you take a good amount of rest and then go back to the intense workout.
HIIT usually involves 10 to 30 mins of intense workout. The activities performed during HIIT may be sprinting, biking, jumping rope, or other bodyweight exercises. These activities can be done moderately, in regular sixty minutes or so. But with HIIT, you get the same results as moderate exercise but in a shorter, more intense exercise.
With the time constraints people of all ages face, it becomes difficult to maintain a sixty-minute or more exercise time regularly or weekly. Thus, HIIT provides the best solution to your daily exercising need.
Benefits of High-Intensity Interval Training
Giving intensified or maximum effort in this style of short exercises may be difficult. But, the outcomes and benefits of HIIT outweigh the difficulties. The following are 10 reasons to perform HIIT:
#1. Burn A Lot of Calories & Fat To Lose Weight
The HIIT method of exercise helps you lose calories and fat. This will help you lose unwanted weight. As per studies by experts in this field, HIIT burns 25–30% more calories than other forms of exercise.
People applying HIIT techniques usually work out with maximum effort for 20 seconds, then take a 40-second break to rest. Subsequently, they start to level up their workout again, and the cycle continues for around 30 minutes.
Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) indicates burning calories after you stop exercising. In this situation, your body burns more calories, balancing the wear and tear of an intense workout. This helps robust muscle growth, as per expert physicians.
#2. Boost Your Metabolic Rate
Your metabolic rate measures how well you burn calories during daily, life-sustaining activities. This rate, in a sense, also indicates how fit you are
If you do HIIT, then you may also get a robust metabolism rate after working out. As HIIT expedites the burning of fats and carbohydrates, your metabolic rate gets boosted in a short time of activity.
HIIT can increase resting energy expenditure, which allows your body to burn calories continually, at an elevated rate, even after exercising. It helps your body maintain a stable metabolic rate most of the time.
#3. Improve Your Stamina & Boost Your Strength
HIIT focuses on the concept of adaption. In other words, as you put a lot of pressure and strain on your body, it adapts to these, helping to cope with the pressure, and increasing its ability to absorb pain. Also, when you push your body to the anaerobic zone, the heart performs at about 80-90% of its maximum rate. This helps the heart, lungs, and muscles to adapt to the pain and increase stamina to tackle this strain in the future.
In time, the body becomes accustomed to the extra pressure and strain, enhancing its metabolism rate to work with the required strength and speed.
#4. Helps To Relief From Stress & Tension
We already know that a healthy body leads to a healthy mind. Routine exercise has been able to mitigate the effects of certain illnesses like depression.
Aligned with that, adding HIIT to your exercise routine helps alleviate the effects of mental illness, like schizophrenia-spectrum disorders and depression. A 2019 meta-analysis of studies and randomized trials on people with severe mental illness yielded that HIIT improved depressed minds more than moderate-intensity continuous training (MCT). MCT involves activities like jogging or swimming.
Researchers also indicate that HIIT at least moderately improves the well-being of depressed and stressed people, giving them new mental strengths to live healthy lives.
#5. Build A Healthier Heart
Research and reports show that continuous and adequate HIIT reduces problems related to heart and blood pressure. As these problems are common among people with overweight and obese, exercising assists in increasing calorie burn and reducing problems involving the heart.
Some studies also indicate that HIIT may even reduce blood pressure at a higher rate than the usual moderate-intensity exercise. This, however, does not typically apply to people in the “normal” BMI range with normal blood pressure.
A study in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, which focused on patients with stable coronary artery diseases, reported that HIIT helped the participants by increasing the oxygen rate, consumed by their body during exercise, by 17.9 percent. This rate is also known as the VO2 peak.
#6. Helps To Regulate Blood Sugar Level
Many studies found that HIIT assists in reducing blood sugar and improving insulin resistance. And it does so better than regular, moderated exercises.
Research in Denmark proves that HIIT programs continuing less than or up to 12 weeks may reduce blood sugar to a good extent in Type 2 Diabetes patients. HIIT improved the control of their insulin levels and improved pancreatic functions.
#7. Helps To Improve Aerobics & Anaerobic Performance
HIIT also helps people perform both anaerobic and aerobic activities to improve their practice. Even if you just practice these during weekends or just run around to enjoy your pass time, HIIT improves your capacity to involve in these activities.
For athletes, who practice aerobics and anaerobic regularly, HIIT can help them expedite their workouts and give them even more stamina and strength.
#8. Helps To Strengthen Your Bones & Gain Muscle
The intensity of HIIT workouts involves many different movements and helps you build your muscles when working on different groups of muscle. Also, when you exercise outside with fresh air and sunlight, the skin absorbs vital vitamin D from the sun, helping maintain healthy bones and teeth.
The lack of “muscular rest” grows your endurance and adaption to pain. Thus, it strengthens your muscles. In addition, highly intense training can also help muscle growth and avoid accumulating muscle mass, which is usually related to inactivity and obesity.
Weight training or weight-lifting remains the most benchmarked form of exercise to enhance muscle mass, but HIIT could assist in a small amount of muscle growth as well.
#9. Improves Oxygen Consumption & Blood Flow
HIIT, which is a type of endurance training method, helps to improve your oxygen consumption.
HIIT gets rid of the traditional long sessions of continuous running or cycling at normal rates and instead can give you the same benefits in a shorter amount of time.
A study reported that participants performing 20-minute HIIT workouts four days per week, for 5 weeks, improved their oxygen intake by around 9%. This equaled the same oxygen consumption in another group in the study, who cycled at steady speeds for 40 minutes per day, 4 days per week.
In addition, oxygen intake is connected to a healthy heart. So, improving the health of your heart allows it to pump blood better to other parts of your body, and maintain a proper flow of blood.
#10. Improves Your Memory & Mental Health
As HIIT improves your mental health by reducing stress and increasing oxygen intake, you feel younger and more focused. And with the proper flow of blood and oxygen to your brain, your memory stays sharper and stronger.
Additionally, better exercise is correlated to better sleep. And sleep quality affects your memory as well as mental health. Thus, when your sleeping habits are improved, you remember and recall better, and also, you feel more relaxed and in a happier mood.
A study conducted in 2020 depicted that, HIIT yielded the best memory performance in inactive older adults as compared to moderate or regular continuous training or exercise. This study found that improving fitness directly relates to an improvement in memory capacity.
Final Words
Excessive HIIT could worsen metabolic health, create unstable blood sugar levels, and cause oxidative stress.
To help you maintain a proper HIIT routine and apply proper HIIT techniques, aamraActive Limited the first corporate boutique gym in Dhaka provides fitness program packages for professionals and young corporates at the best prices. aamraActive, creates a unique and customized fitness routine for you, using the right metrics, to help you reach your fitness goal in the shortest time possible.
With aamraActive Limited, you hit the ball out of the park with the HIIT exercise method. Get the most suitable program for you at the best price.
