Everything You Need to Know About High Intensity Training
Some people believe that to get your dream body or goal weight, you need to work out as many times as possible every week, during the morning, afternoon, and evening. While it’s true that frequency is an essential factor in developing your training regimen, it’s not all that matters!
Whether you’re preparing to enter a fitness competition or just want to gain some muscle for your benefit, you need to exercise smart. There’s a science behind workout plans—they consider various aspects such as your age, cardiovascular health, exercise background, fitness assessment, and more to develop a plan that works for you.
Doing 100 sit-ups, pushups, and squats for three years like One Punch Man isn’t going to help you. To achieve your weight goal or win a fitness competition, it’s crucial to take into account a critical component of exercising—intensity.
Burning More Calories In Less Time
Burning many calories without spending too much time exercising sounds impossible, but experts have developed a particular type of training that could do just that. Given the benefits of High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), no wonder it is a popular training technique among fitness enthusiasts!
Alternating periods of high intensity with rest recovery brings your heart rate up to a work period lasting around five to eight seconds long. Afterward, you back down for a recovery interval that could last as long as the work period.
In short, HIIT involves doing short bursts of workouts where you exert yourself at your max level and slow down or rest in between those intervals. Unlike a steady-state cardio workout, varying the intensity of your workout and recovery intervals leads to burning more calories in much less time.
As you increase the amount of exertion required to perform an exercise, you will use more of your muscles, which leads you to burn more calories, improve your insulin sensitivity, and much more. When you increase the intensity of your workouts according to your competence level, you have a higher chance of getting to your goal weight much faster!
How to Succeed at HIIT
For weight training, intensity means how heavy you lift, so you must lift the heaviest weight you can when performing HIIT. However, this is not just what HIIT or weight training involves. To have a successful workout program, you must keep in mind the principles of HIIT, which Mike Mentzer, Matt Brzycki, Stuart McRobert, and others worked hard to develop.
Here are some of the principles that lay the foundation of HIIT:
Do your repetitions and sets that lead to complete muscle failure at the end of each set. Make sure to choose a relatively heavy weight for eight to twelve repetitions of each exercise.
If you are entirely unable to move the weight to the desired position with good form at the last repetition of one set, you don’t need to do further repetitions.
You need fewer sets to do full-body workouts and achieve superior results.
To rapidly provide strength and muscle development, it’s crucial to attempt to increase the load at each successive workout.
Conclusion
High intensity training is certainly not for the faint of heart, but this is a crucial type of training to help you burn more calories and reach your goal weight! Sure, you may struggle and hesitate to continue initially. Still, as long as you work with a great bodybuilding competition prep coach, you’ll be able to get the hang of it and have a higher chance of winning a fitness competition!
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