A revolution in fitness has been happening for the past 5-6 years. Everyone is talking about HIIT… but most are missing the actual important components. Yes, HIIT is very good but HIIT workouts can’t just be about high intensity if you want to get amazing results!
Are you trying to improve your fitness, lose body fat and get your body to function better? Generally, people turn to running, swimming, cycling, or maybe a team sport like football, etc. Science and the latest fitness trends are proving that these are not the best options. The main reason is that these activities do not require the body to travel through a full range of movement at every joint. For example, when you jog your hip isn’t even moving through 50% of its full range.
To get the best results… and I do mean you can achieve all 3 goals of losing fat, improving both function and fitness in the one workout! New Exercise formats like ZUU, MetaFit and F45 are rapidly spreading across the globe. The reason for this is because they work! All of these workouts are high intensity but more importantly they focus on having participants move through full range of motion at all joints, they select whole body movements that challenge coordination and stability while obviously working in short time periods at maximum effort.
There are pro’s and cons of correct HIIT training. Some cons related to full range of motion HIITare that it’s not a workout for lazy people. If you’re going to do it, then you can’t half-ass it. If you’re told bear crawl for 30 seconds, then you better perform an all out bear crawl for 30 seconds. It might help to imagine yourself being chased by a cheetah. HIIT can definitely impair recovery. They are generally not a workouts that you can do every day. If you do HIIT every day, then you could be looking into some serious overtraining problems. With these cons in mind there are amazing benefits to full range of motion HIIT.
Time efficient
You no longer have to slave away on the treadmill for 60 minutes at a time. 15 – 20 minutes is definitely long enough.
Specific Fitness
It mimics real life situations where you actually perform short intense bursts of activity. Because seriously, in what real life situation would you have to run 5 Kilometres?
Benefit to Risk Ratio
Reduces risk of injury due to the limited impact while performing the exercise and because joints are being conditioning through a full range of motion
Increased Aerobic Capacity
The amount of oxygen your body can use (oxygen uptake) is increased, so your overall aerobic capacity can increase faster than with low intensity endurance exercise
Improved Insulin Sensitivity
Your muscles more readily suck in glucose, instead of the glucose going to your fat stores.
Anabolic Effect
Some studies show that interval training combined with consuming slightly more calories than you burn creates an anabolic effect, which helps you put on muscleand create a great toned body shape. The opposite occurs with steady state cardio, which for long durations is catabolic.
HIIT the Afterburn
Full range of motion HIIT is demanding on the body, making it a tough workout, but the upside of this means the body’s metabolism is raised for 24 hours post-workout. Put simply, the afterburn effect, also known as EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption), means that the body burns calories at a higher rate than normal after exercise. The more intense the exercise, the greater the afterburn effect.
Healthy Insides
These types of workouts are especially effective at shifting visceral fat, which is the fat surrounding the vital organs deep inside the abdomen (belly fat). High levels of visceral fat have been reported to be associated with high cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure and even types of cancer, so doing all we can to shift it and keep these levels of fat as low as possible is extremely beneficial to overall health.
Now is the time to break from the old and learn the new way of fitness. If you want to get as lean as possible, be as fit as possible and be as functionally strong as possible, then you must incorporate full range of motion HIIT training into your schedule. Plodding the pavements is not going to change your body shape nor make you function better. Try the new, better way of exercising…
Stay in touch – Join our online and email community to keep up-to-date with our articles, recipes, workouts and awesome events
