Fitness Articles

What is High Intensity Training (HIT) ?

High Intensity Training involves lifting a weights slowly without the use of momentum. This is a very safe and effective way to load muscles, and it produces a rapid rate of fatigue. All exercise are performed until the weight can no longer be lifted, the muscle 'inroad', resulting in a host of benefits.

Clients who use the high intensity training method successfully build muscle, enhance their cardiovascular efficiency, raise their metabolic rates, improve all markers of cellular health (including lowering blood pressure), lose fat and dramatically improve strength and functional ability.

The key to exercise success is the degree of muscle fiber involvement. Many protocols do not involve any more than a bare minimum of fibers, thus up to two-thirds of the benefit can be lost. However, the more fibers that are involved, the quicker you will exhaust them. Therefore, exercise, to be productive, must be intense enough to involve all of the available fibers and, consequently, brief in duration.

The Importance Of Muscle

Sarcopenia is the name for age related muscle loss, which occurs from around the age of 30. We lose around half a pound of muscle every year as we get old, which has negative consequences - reduced ability to perform tasks, sagging and atrophied muscles, weight gain and a decreased resistance to common ailments.

In attempt to lose weight many people embark on steady state, low intensity exercises - jogging, walking, cross trainer, cycling etc.

Unfortunately these exercises will not prevent muscle loss as they do not effectively fatigue muscle, so doing them in the absence of strength work isn't going to do wonders for weight loss.

The key to fat loss is to gain lean muscle tissue (and a sensible diet plan that cuts out refined carbohydrates) - and high intensity training offers a logical way to achieve this.

Five Steps to Fat Loss

1. Complete a high intensity session once per week, or minimum once every 10 days. This has an incredibly positive effect on your metabolism, enabling you to mobilize fat stores more effectively than longer, more frequent and less intense exercise protocols. You will also progress with every session.

2. Recover fully from exercise and don't become anxious that you need to keep doing more training. You do not have to train again in the week if this session is completed at the right level.

3. Nutrition. Trying to 'burn off' excess calories by doing exercise doesn't work. Exercise doesn't actually burn that many calories. At the same time, reducing your overall calorie intake and doing lots of exercise can be stressful for the body and not sustainable.

A sensible and effective combination is high intensity exercise once per week, coupled with a very nutritious diet than eliminates refined carbohydrates and is based around whole foods (such as the 'hunter / gatherer' model)

4. Relax. Too much stress causes a rise in the hormone cortisol, known as the 'stress hormone' - this can have a negative effect on ones ability to mobilize fat and gain muscle. Therefore, learning avoiding stress as much as possible, sleeping and eating well all contribute to a hormonal environment best suited for fat loss.


High Intensity Training for Women


Many women fear that lifting weights with intensity is somehow going to give them big muscles, almost every woman that has trained here starts by saying "I don't want big muscles, i just want to tone my muscles"

This statement has little understanding of exercise science. As women don't produce much testosterone and have less muscle mass than men, women have to work very hard with weights in order to achieve muscle 'tone' - 'tone' actually means bigger muscle and less fat covering the muscle.

It is a shame that so many women have dismissed productive weight training in favour of traditonal 'aerobic' type activity. Many fitness classses popular with women such as aqua aerobic and step classes, do very little to stimulate the muscle fibers and bring about a physiological change to the body. These type of classes, as with running programs, also require a high volume (typically 3 times per week) - again the higher volume is at the expense of the correct intensity.

The typical 'aerobics' ethos is to burn calories, yet it is too easy to exit the swimming pool feeling hungry and consume more calories than you have burnt off -  Longer training sessions make you more hungry as well, so short and intense is always favourable.

Womens magazines generally give very poor advise on exercise, devoid of any real science. I am sure there are many women who have tried the same thing and failed over and over again - a calorie controlled diet plus a higher output of 'aerobic' type activity.

In many cases this isn't maintained and regression occurs, so if this is the case it is time to try something different.

A simple solution might be to stop trying to burn off calories and instead work on a diet that is free of refined carbohydrates (or very limited) and exercise once every seven days with high intensity - that means a short workout that involves working with weights, and a workout that progresses every week. Your body will respond with a loss in body fat and the desired muscle 'tone'.