Jay, over at her blog Find Your Strength, has a good post about the importance of interval training for everyone, not just athletes.
Jay says:
As you prepare to undertake a new fitness program, don’t get sucked into programs that prescribe hours upon hours of cardio each week. Not only are those kind of workouts ineffective for most people, they pave the way for overuse injury, and, frankly, boredom.
What is an interval training workout? It’s one where you basically work at a high intensity for a period of time, followed by working (or resting) for a period of time. And then you repeat the cycle.
Why should you train this way? There’s a time and a place for steady cardio training. However, if you want to burn serious calories and improve your overall fitness quickly, interval training is for you. You accomplish a lot more in 30 minutes training this way than you would running or walking at the same pace for the whole time.
Great points. I’ve mentioned at some point before, that 30 minutes of high intensity interval training is probably better than doing 2 hours of steady, slow jogging on the treadmill. DR’s blog, Healthhabits has done a really good series on HIIT.
With the interval training, you will raise your heart-rate more, and you will also raise your resting metabolic rate, which allows your body to burn more calories while you are just doing your normal everyday activities, including sleeping.
When I read Jay’s post, it made me think of another car/body analogy that I think will help people understand why interval training is best… I couldn’t resist telling it to you because it might actually be my best analogy yet.
Let’s say you have a job that requires you to do a lot of driving. Your boss is quite eccentric, and he says that you have to put at least one tank of gas into your company car everyday. You can always stop and put more in if it needs it, but you can never put in less than one tank, and you can’t take any gas out at the end of the day. If you do not follow this, you will be fired!
Now, your boss is going to actually let you choose your vehicle!
You can choose from:
- A gas sipping two door Smart car?
- A gas guzzling SUV with a 400 horsepower V8 Hemi engine?
Oh, and for some reason they both have the same size gas tank.
Which do you choose?
Putting the environment and the cost of gas aside, your job is the most important thing in your life. Therefore, the vehicle with the biggest engine, that burns the most fuel, would be more likely to require you to need to put more fuel into it, and keep your job.
In this scenario, having a powerful SUV is a good thing.
If you only do steady, very low intensity cardio training, your engine will continue to just sip gas, and it will only sip gas while you are driving it.
Doing shorter bursts of high intensity training is like stop and go driving! It burns much more gas than slow and steady driving. ALSO, you’re in luck because your big engine actually leaks gas when you’re not driving it. So, if you didn’t do much driving (exercise) the day before, your job is safe, and you’ve got plenty of room for more fuel tomorrow.
Is everyone thoroughly confused now? Good.
You can get even greater benefits with shorter periods of high intensity strength training. Same effect on the cardiovascular system as interval training if the intensity is high enough, with the added benefit of lean bodymass gains, which translates to a higher resting metabolic rate. Not only do you burn more calories during the workout, you increase the calories burned all the rest of the time if you’re adding lean body mass.
Thanks for that shoutout
High intensity strength training is also very fun. Not only does it have great physiological benefits, it also prevents boredom!
I’m pretty sure my hill workouts qualify as HIIT workouts. Up and then down, up and down again, I’m keeping up my speed on both ups and downs.
BTW, I love the gas analogy……………:)
In point of fact, two hours of slow, steady running will burn more calories than 30 minutes of interval training, and a higher fraction of those calories will be derived from fatty acids (from stored lipids and blood triglycerides) rather than glucose (from stored glycogen in muscle and liver). You are, however, correct about higher-intensity exercise resulting in a prolonged elevation of BMR.
Another thing to consider is that intervals can only be done two or three times a week at most, even in highly trained endurance athletes; this is because of the greater breakdown of muscle tissue that results from more intense training (although two-hour runs on hilly outdoor courses will involve muscle breakdown resulting from sheer mechanical forces and, in some cases, glycogen depletion).
All things being equal, a two-hour run at even very low aerobic intensity (60 to 65 percent of max HR) will always burn more fuel than a highly intense interval workout lasting 30 minutes, only 15 to 20 of those minutes being run at high (90 to 95 percent of max HR) intensity. (For reference, the intensity normally prescribed by learned coaches, equivalent to “max VO2,” is that which an athlete could maintain continuously for no more than 10-12 minutes–about two-mile race pace for a solid high-school runner and close to 5K pace for world-class athletes.)
Of course, any proper regimen will include a judicious mixture of both types of training as well as medium-long, medium-intensity efforts (e.g., “tempo runs,” also known as lactate-threshold runs).
On the topic of injury, the consensus is that most people are more likely to become injured as a result of too much intense training, not too much overall mileage. This, however, depends on whether runners commit to doing as much training as they can on soft surfaces. When I was running 100 or more miles a week for months on end in training for marathons, I would limit myself as much as possible to smooth trails, and I would guess the impact stresses were equivalent to those incurred through 50 or 60 miles a week on asphalt (based on soreness and other subjective factors).
And to those wed to the treadmill: If you can, get outside! Of course the ‘mill will bore the bejesus out of you if you do long runs there, although at this time of year, those of us in northern latitudes are all to often forced indoors by evil weather.