This is a guest post by Dr. Ron Fritzke. COntact us if you would like to write a guest post for us.
While this may not end up being the most popular article among the many excellent articles here on the Correct Weight Loss Blog, I’m writing about what I see as an under-served area in the arena of losing weight.
I’m about to cover a technique called High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) to optimize the exercise part of losing weight.
The internet is littered with very good advice on the topics of what to put in your mouth — or what to keep away from your mouth. What I don’t see much of on weight loss sites are very many articles detailing some of the most efficient exercise styles, like HIIT, to burn up those calories as quickly as possible.
I come from a background of competitive long distance racing (in distances up to the marathon), as well as bike racing. Tremendous buckets of calories are torched during training for these events, so calorie-burning is right up my alley.
What I could learn from is some of the excellent food advice on Correct Weight Loss Blog, perhaps I’ll stick around and learn something.
There’s ‘Interval’ Exercise And Then There’s HIIT!
In the world of competitive sports there are a variety of workout styles…each with a different mission in the quest for a fitness peak. When we take these different types of workouts and cross them over to the world of weight loss, there is a workout category called ‘intervals’ which is a perfect companion to the ‘what you eat or don’t eat’ half of the weight loss formula.
I purposely started out labeling this type of workout merely ‘intervals‘ rather than the modern idiom ‘High Intensity Interval Training’ (HIIT).
Coming from decades of involvement in the world of intervals, I guess I’m unwilling to hand over the reins of the ‘interval’ carriage to the modern-day, breathless gym owners without giving a bit of historic perspective.
Current day fitness gurus are all a-buzz with this new HIIT, but some of them are unaware that if they’d had an athletic grandpa back in the 1950′s, he’d no doubt have been using intervals to try to get fit enough for the Olympic games.
What started decades ago has been recently rediscovered…and you can benefit from it!
But why’s HIIT such a perfect match for weight loss…and just as importantly, what is it?
An HIIT Definition From Wikipedia
The definition that I found in Wikipedia is- “HIIT is an exercise strategy intended to improve performance by using short training sessions. HIIT is a form of Cardiovascular exercise which is beneficial to burning fat”.
You can click over to this Wikipedia link to get a more scholarly perspective of HIIT.
If you want to get a quick understanding of HIIT, think of a runner alternating 20 seconds of sprinting with 40 seconds of jogging…and then repeating that 8 times.
Let’s Flesh Out Some HIIT Benefits
Strict HIIT is a version of intervals with some real advantages for weight loss.
- HIIT is short in duration, so that even the busiest people can squeeze in an HIIT workout several times a week.
- The real magic in using HIIT is in the fact that the metabolism remains elevated for up to 24 hours after the workout is complete. And an elevated metabolism means… fat is burning.
- There are readily available machines that make HIIT workouts possible for even those people who are just starting out on the weight loss journey, and who’d be ill-advised to subject their backs, hips, knees, and ankles to very much pounding. While I used the example above of a runner alternating sprinting with jogging, a 300 pound person would be ill-advised to subject their body to such a beating.
- This HIIT type of workout can be readily done on a simple exercise bike. I use one of the best bicycle trainers called the Kinetic Kurt Road Machine. It allows me a shock-free indoor workout on the same bike that I ride outdoors when the weather’s nice.
My Personal Experience With Intervals and Weight Loss
After I ended my racing career to raise my son and daughter, I continued on with a fitness program. I was running five mile runs, ten mile runs, and all sorts of runs in between. I was also slowly gaining weight.
It was only when my kids grew old enough to start racing themselves that I started to once again do some interval-style workouts with them. In this case it was running repetitions on a pretty steep hill that took just over a minute to get up if we were going as hard as we could each time. We separated the 8 to 10 repetitions with an easy jog down the hill.
Interestingly enough, the weight that I’d been putting on over the years started to melt off after a series of these hill repeats. I knew something was different with this type of workout, because my heart rate would stay 15 to 20 beats per minute above my normal resting heart rate for hours after the workout.
In fact, there were times I had a hard time getting to sleep at night due to the increased metabolism. As you can surmise, the energy for revving my engine for hours after the workout had to come from somewhere…and that somewhere was the fat that was riding just above my belt.
HIIT And Other Interval-Style Workouts
Of course doing an HIIT workout like the one mentioned above (alternating 20 second sprints with 40 second jogs…repeated eight times) is classic HIIT.
But another HIIT that caught my eye went something like this (it was all done on a stationary bike):
- 5 minutes warm-up.
- 10 minutes, alternating 10 seconds very hard pedaling with 20 seconds of easy pedaling.
- 5 minutes warm-down.
In the event your interest is peaked regarding the type of intervals athletes are doing to reach maximum conditioning, consider this example of an interval-style workout (done on a bike stand trainer, or outdoors on a bike).
- 10 minutes warm-up.
- 2 minutes hard, followed by one minute easy.
- 3 minutes hard, followed by one and a half minutes easy.
- 4 minutes hard, followed by two minutes easy.
- 5 minutes hard, followed by two and a half minutes easy.
- 6 minutes hard, followed by three minutes easy.
- 5 minutes hard, followed by two and a half minutes easy.
- 4 minutes hard, followed by two minutes easy.
- 3 minutes hard, followed by one and a half minutes easy.
- 2 minutes hard.
- 10 minutes warm-down.
Runners are more likely to do an interval workout like this one:
- Two miles easy warm-up.
- 8 times 800 meters running at the pace of their best two mile run, with a two minute rest between each hard interval.
- Two miles easy warm-down.
Don’t Kill Yourself, Just Lose Weight And Keep It Off
You’ve no doubt read enough about the risks associated with initiating a new exercise program to know that you are well-advised to check with your doctor before starting out. This advice applies even more so when it comes to doing HIIT, since it can be very strenuous.
On the other hand, HIIT is such an effective use of the time and energy you put into exercising that you owe it to yourself to give them a try. Because your fat burning furnace keeps smoldering for hours after the workout is done, you’ll even be losing weight when you’re sitting on the couch resting from your venture into the world of ‘interval training’.
Getting a little extra boost in the journey to your optimal weight is something everyone can welcome. Interval training and HIIT – even in very mild forms – can be a key ingredient in the formula to get the extra weight off and to keep it off, which is the theme of this site…Correct-Weight-Loss.net.
About the author: Dr. Ron Fritzke reviews cycling gear on his site, Cycling-Review.com. Besides being a chiropractor in Mount Shasta, California, he’s on the Sports Medicine team at the College of the Siskiyous. A former 2:17 marathon runner, he now races his bike in Northern California.
