HIIT, which is short for high intensity interval training, could possibly be one of the very most beneficial exercise methods that have been created. High intensity interval training refers to workouts that have sort bursts of high intensity exercises that are spaced out over multiple intervals and are separated by periods of rest that are a little bit longer than the exercise portions.
HIIT is beneficial for many reasons. It is usually quite intense and taxing on the body but there are still HIIT regimens that can be performed by exercisers that are no more physically fit than average. HIIT should be defined in all its parts to help the exerciser create his or her own interval training regimen.
For an exercise to be high intensity, the exercise should be vigorous enough that the exerciser is physically unable to perform the exercise for more than a short amount of time. Sprinting is an example of a high intensity exercise because the human body can only run at full speed for about 10 seconds before starting to fail.
For home exercisers, it might be hard to gauge the intensity of exercises, but education on the matter can help exercisers form rough guideline that can be applied personally. When clinical studies are performed to measure the results of HIIT regimens, sophisticated equipment is used to measure the amount of work that the exerciser is able to accomplish as well as the amount of oxygen their body processes.
In such a clinical test, an exerciser would be running on a treadmill with while breath monitor analyzed the amounts of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the athlete’s inhalations and exhalations. Since oxygen is needed for aerobic activities such as treadmill running, measuring the amounts of oxygen that an exerciser processes in a workout lets the researchers know how efficiently the exerciser uses energy.
The term VO2-max refers to the maximum volume of oxygen that an individual is able to utilize fully and steadily. If an exercise is a 50% VO2-max exercise it only requires 50% of the oxygen that the exerciser is capable of utilizing.
Different HIIT regimens use different VO2-max exercises during the exercise phases and the exercise and rest phases will also vary in length. For example, one HIIT method which is known as the Tabatha method uses 170 % VO2-max treadmill sprints for 20 second intervals followed by 10 seconds of rest, and repeated for a total of 8 times.