Let’s HIT It – High Intensity Training
Nearly everybody knows that exercise is important. But the problem isn’t a matter of knowing what’s important but it’s often a simple matter of making time for exercise. When our lives are filled with work, family, friends, and other obligations, it’s easy to understand why exercise often falls to the wayside. Often, the thought of a sixty-minute-long workout when you’re exhausted from a long day of work is simply too daunting to even consider. But one of the solutions to this problem is simple: if you increase the intensity at which you work, you can shorten the amount of time you need to work out.
High Intensity Training, or HIT, was a concept developed in the 1970s by Arthur Jones, founder of the fitness corporation Nautilus. It is based around the principles that exercise should be brief, infrequent, and intense. It theorizes that, if you push yourself to maximum capacity faster, this will force your body to adjust and burn whatever fuel it has on hand, quickly moving from carbohydrates to fat. And if it’s infrequent, your body will have less time to get used to these unexpected bursts of activity and, therefore, won’t store up fat for future use, thus speeding up your metabolism.
It was originally developed as a weight training concept for bodybuilders, but it can certainly be adapted for those who simply want to get or stay in shape. Whereas bodybuilders work hard at building maximum bulk, you may simply want to burn fat and tone your body. These bodybuilders focus almost solely on anaerobic exercise, exercises that push your muscles to a point at which the oxygen from your bloodstream isn’t enough anymore and your muscles simply cease to function. But by incorporating some aerobic exercise into your workout regimen, you’ll be able to balance out HIT’s heavy emphasis on anaerobic exercise.
You can apply HIT principles to aerobic respiration, too. You can start by alternating sprints and jogs in your running. You can sprint for thirty seconds and then jog for one minute, gradually increasing the length and frequency of your sprints over time. But as with any workout regimen, it’s important to start slow and gradually increase the intensity of your exercise. If you injure yourself, then you won’t be able to exercise at all, which would defeat the purpose of why you decided to start High Intensity Training in the first place. Train, but train safely.
