HIIT Research Paper

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Just about everyone and his mama has heard about High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT for short. HIIT has been found to have various advantages over other forms of exercise for both fat loss and retaining muscle mass. It seems everyone has jumped on the HIIT bandwagon and regularly talk about how they do 40 minutes or so of HIIT and so on. The problem is, most of the people who claim to be doing HIIT are not. A quick hint: if the person was doing true HIIT, they would not be able to do 20 minutes of it, much less 40!

Many, if not most, people seem to confuse HIIT with regular interval training. HIIT is in fact a form of interval training, but not all interval training is HIIT. Put simply, Interval training is a varying of intensities …show more content…

For example, the other day I did 4 minutes of walking on a treadmill at 3.5mph hour followed by 1 minute of running at 8.5mph (which for my short legs is pretty fast pace!) and repeated the cycle 5 times, which meant I was doing a 1:4 run/walk that lasted about 30 minutes including warm up and warm down. Was that HIIT? No, it was not. It was interval training, which is effective and productive training, but it's not …show more content…

The fact is however, most people claiming to do HIIT are not...another essential point is, HIIT is not for everyone. It requires a higher level of fitness, and many people are better off starting with various interval programs similar to what I wrote above vs. HIIT. Done too often, and or combined with other forms of high intensity exercise (e.g., weight lifting, etc.) HIIT can and will lead to over training and or injury, or as James Krieger concludes in his excellent review on the topic

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